SenchaCon 2013 in Orlando Florida
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PDFSencha (the company behind ExtJS) is putting together another SenchaCon on July 16-19 at the Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin. There's a very good chance I will be there and I highly recommend this event to everyone sharing the HTML5 vision. Hope to see you there!
ExtJS 4.2 & Architect 2.2 – Plugins
I've been liking Sencha's Architect IDE more and more as it's been maturing over time. In my last post I wrote about making custom plugins in ExtJS 4, but how do you go about using them through Architect?
First step would be to ensure the we have the plugin code; I accomplished this by adding a JS Resource:
Next step should be easy enough; I figured adding a custom "plugins" property with a value of "["ux.fadeinplugin"]" on a given Panel would do the trick:
...however, while this does work when tested in browser, this causes Architect's canvas to go blank, essentially rendering it useless. Upon further research, there are known bugs surrounding this, but no fix yet.
Read on for a workaround in Architect...
ExtJS 4.2 Plugin Example
I've enjoyed the 4.2 ExtJS release since it came out; especially the new theme and grids. I recently wanted to "puff in" a Panel for some eyecandy, but I quickly realized it's a bit trickier than you might think.
Components don't have slideOut or fadeIn methods like Elements do.
It's not a problem in case of "hiding" actions (i.e. slideOut or puff), which you can accomplish by something like component.getEl().slideOut().
However, in the case where you want to "show" a hidden panel (i.e. slideIn), in a case of deferred rendering (i.e. when creating and showing a new panel on the fly), the getEl() doesn't have a DOM element to show yet, until the panel has been rendered.
The fadeIn method is achieved by showing a panel with CSS opacity 0% and then animating it back to 100%.
I ended up solving this via means of a plugin. Can you think of a more elegant solution?
ASP.NET MVC4 Stripped
I've been ramping up on Microsoft's latest and greatest ASP.NET MVC4 and while I love the technology, I hate the tight integration into Visual Studio. I could not find a single example that did not require a compilation of a DLL by Visual Studio.
I'm used to my Just in Time compiling, so I went hard to work at ripping out the Visual Studio umbilical cord and was able to produce a (what I think is) much cleaner setup. Most of all, it doesn't require re-compiling every time, so you don't need Visual Studio!
I should warn that this doesn't have the "view" or "model" hookups; just the controller - with the default "Values" example. Since I work with ExtJS it's mainly the Web API enabled by the controller that I'm after.
Download: MVC4Test (Stripped) (~2 MB)
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
- Install .NET 4.5 (I used MS Web Platform Installer)
- Make sure IIS application pool runs under .NET 4.0
- Make sure .NET 4 is allowed in IIS (CGI Restrictions)
- Install ASP.NET MVC 4 - I did not use MS Web Platform Installer, as it will also want to install a SQLExpress database; instead I used stand-alone installer (http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4)
ExtJS4+ “IntelliSense” in Eclipse :)
On Tuesday Sencha announced "Complete" and "Complete: Team" bundles, where of particular interest to me was the Eclipse "IntelliSense" Plugin (see Sencha's excellent video).
I tried it for myself - it's a pretty standard Eclipse plugin install:
There's an Eclipse tutorial for how to setup a project; it took me about 5 minutes. I got stuck in a few spots, but figured it out. I plugged in a basic Fieldset extension and look at the depth of auto-complete - it recognizes ExtJS object hierarchy in great depth:
There's also Eclipse help covering the great range of features. Overall, I was very impressed.
I use Notepad++, but this just might sway me to use Eclipse. Although, the $995 for the cheapest bundle option, is rather stingy. I really wish Sencha would offer this as a stand-alone product.