TAE Boston Slides

Also, I quickly rounded up the example code I wrote and walked through during the presentation. Included is the MySQL database backup, php, html, and javascript files. I quickly ran through and added some comments to the Javascript, so hopefully it should be pretty straight forward. As for the php please note that this is only an example. There is absolutely no filtering and this code would be easily vulnerable to security exploits. Though it can still serve as an extremely basic example of the bare minimum needed.

The examples include a GridPanel with sorting and a paging toolbar, and a FormPanel with several text fields, an htmleditor and some simple validation.

Download the examples

* Examples require Ext 2.0
* PHP requires v5 for the JSON functions

Ajax Experience
The presentation at The Ajax Experience Boston was a big hit. The session went much more hands on than my previous in San Fran as I walked through some full end-to-end examples using a MySQL database and some simple PHP scripts to feed the data to Ext. I will make the slides and example code available soon.

Ext 2.0 RC1
The Ext team has continued to crank away and recently released 2.0 Release Candidate 1, looks like they’re on track for the official 2.0 release later this month. As always, check out the download page for the latest release.

New Ext 2.0 Documents
Ext has always had some of the best documentation available for an open source framework. Lately the team has worked up some very nice overview and conversion docs to help everyone make the transition and learn the new Ext 2.0 architecture. They are featured prominently at the top of the Ext Learn page.

Ext.nd Updates
I have been asked from quite a few people about Ext 2.0 and Ext.nd. We have started working on the conversion process and will release it as soon as we’ve finished converting the existing components over. We are looking at pushing out a final release based of the the Ext 1x that includes our last round of bug fixes and even tosses in the ViewSuggest component I hinted at a while back. Keep an eye out for this release in the very near future.

More to come soon…

Also new in this release is the much requested inclusion of a CHANGE_LOG.txt file. Nicely organized by file it lists out what was changed and updated.

On another note, I have been asked to give the Ext presentation again at The Ajax Experience East. This time it is in Boston, MA – October 24-26. I expect things to go a little better this time around as I now know I need to cut the first part of the presentation a bit shorter so that I have more time for the demos and hands-on portion.

On another note, the Ext Team has made the final 1.1 release and declared it as the new stable version! Head on over to the Ext Blog to check out the latest additions. Or you could just grab a copy and play around with it yourself.

Quick Highlights:

• Ext.base – you no longer need a separate base library
• HTML Editor – a nice lightweight rich text input field, saves results as html
• Datepicker – some slick new enhancements

Check out the blog article for more.

For those Ext’ers already out there, we’re planning to try and get together either at the Wednesday night reception or perhaps after everything on Thursday night. Keep an eye on this thread for up to date info.

See you there.

For more information check out the session abstract.

I’m really looking forward to it and am working to put together a nice hands on walk-through of the Ext library. I know everyone out there is just dying to hear me speaking again after that last podcast

Next stop… Lotusphere ‘08..?

On a side note, I was pretty amazed at the size of Zimbra’s application, they stated during the presentation that it contains nearly 130,000 lines of javascript…. crazy people…

After some pretty strong examples, I now see some very good applications for flash within web sites. Adbobe had a keynote presentation showing off Flash, Flex and their Flex – Ajax bridge which was quite impressive. They showed several cases using a small flash widgets of sorts that would interact using ajax to update html content on the page. The result was a nice interactive widget that would have been otherwise much harder to develop using html and javascript alone.

An example in a different session showed a totally different use, a 1×1 px transparant flash object was used on a page to maintain a connection between that page and the server. The result was that a change on the server could then call a javascript function on the page to update content. The example showed a simple contact manager with basic CRUD functionality that would update its content on all copies of that page whenever a change was made. They went on to talk about other applications such as in page chat and other advanced forms of collaboration right within a web page.

Tomorrow there is a session about Dojo.storage which uses flash solely for access to local storage, it was stated that up to 100k could be stored… which definitely could prove quite useful.

PS – sorry to all of those leaving comments on the old site about links not working, I’ll be going through and fixing all those pages to forward to the current locations on this domain today or tomorrow.

Edit: Gotta give these NFJS guys props right off the bat, your id card pulls out and folds open into a mini schedule of events! Nice little touch I’ve not seen at past conferences.