I'm getting close to finisihing the first phase of a fairly large application using ExtJS as the front end. Having only discovered ExtJS about 2 months ago, I've been working my butt off to learn it and make my app really shine by using it heavily for the UI (mostly grids, tabs, forms & windows). For a business application, you can't beat the look and feel of this UI.
Here are some random thoughts on my experience: - The online API docs are a pure joy to work with. That's important, because you'll find yourself getting *very* intimate with it as constant reference. The viewer is written in ExtJS, check it out: http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/docs/ and you'll see what I mean. - The ExtJS API is very well thought out and thorough. It never ceases to amaze how they've thought of everything. Everything so far that I've needed to accomplish or solve, I've been able to. Sometimes it's not readily apparent, but there's so many classes, methods and events to work that you just need to keep reading the API. Did I mention it's a joy to work with ;) - In Cake, I've essentially eliminated all my views, and just send down JSON packets for ExtJS to work with. The javascript helper's object method works great for this...my views are essentially one liners: <?php echo $javascript->object($data);?> - My controllers have slimmed down considerably as the data arrays returned from the models pass right through to the view (with a success, total, and error messages tacked on to the arrays as needed). - The xtemplate feature of ExtJS simply rocks. It allows you, for instance, to loop through and render a record's related child data in a grid cell into, say a bulleted list. I used to do all this on the server in a view file that sends down all the data and markup. With ExtJS able to do an awesome job with this sort of work, you just send down the associative array data as JSON and let the pretty formatted grid get rendered in javascript. It's super cool! - There are bunches of user submitted extensions in the ExtJS community forums that allow you to do some really cool things easily. Do grid customizations, handle the showing of PDF's and other media in a very slick fashion, change the look with a new theme, ... - For forms, you can use a mapping feature of ExtJS's Record/ JsonReader to make your fields submit back in the Cake-expected "data[Model][fieldname]" format. This is a very powerful technique as it allows you to pass your cake generated associate PHP arrays UN- TOUCHED! to the front end and receive it back. Here's what that mapping looks like in ExtJS: var AnalysisRecord = Ext.data.Record.create([ {name: 'data[Analysis][id]', mapping: "Analysis.id"}, {name: 'data[Analysis][user_id]', mapping: "Analysis.user_id"}, {name: 'data[Analysis][analysis_name]', mapping: "Analysis.analysis_name"}, {name: 'data[Analysis][analysis_date]', mapping: "Analysis.analysis_date", type: 'date', dateFormat: 'Y-m-d'} ]); var AnalysisReader = new Ext.data.JsonReader({ root: "data", successProperty: 'success' }, AnalysisRecord); - I use Cake's requestHandler to help me distinguish between data read requests (queries) and data changing action requests (Insert, edit, deletes). Doing "POST" & "GET" requests to solve this didn't work because often times I want to POST parameters to get data. So, all my read requests use a .json extension and all my action requests use a ".ext" extension. My controller acts accordingly: if it sees .ext, process the submitted form data, if it sees .json. No extension lays down the initial page with any included js files needed for that page. (I haven't gone totally ExtJS for the front end yet, so I still link to high level pages, rather than loading ExtJS once and using all AJAX requests thereafter...but that will come in time). - Cake is convention over configuration...ExtJS is all about configuration. You'll get very comfortable using javascript object notation if you're not already ;). It's neat stuff though. I like what I'm hearing from the others in this thread about making Cake components/helpers to hopefully eliminate the redundancy of configuring ExtJS to know about your data structure. My approach isn't optimal, but it's working. I'm up against some deadline for my first release. The important part of this project is the user experience. Once that is accomplished, then I'll take a step back and work on programmer's experience, and look for ways to make marrying these two awesome frameworks better. As Chris likes to say: first make it work, then make it work better. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to cake-php@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
