Sencha folks have been working on an awesome new tool. It’s called fiddle.sencha.com:
If you’re familiar with jsfiddle.net, it’s essentially the same concept, but targeted at ExtJS and Sencha Touch, with some tasty features thrown in, i.e. performance analysis:
Even though it’s in beta, I’ve been using it for sometime now without much issue. Fiddle away!
Sencha (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!
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?
Continue reading ExtJS 4.2 Plugin Example
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.
Last I worked with Sencha SDK it was still version 1.2.3 beta. I had many difficulties with it and decided it certainly wasn’t ready, even for manual builds of my ASP.NET/ExtJS projects. Well, version 2.0.0 beta 3 has been out for a while now and I decided to give it a try.
The Good
I am now able to reference local .html files in the command line parameters. In last version I was only able to point it to an HTTP URL, which didn’t work for my Windows-authenticated websites.
The Bad
ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Ext phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():2 phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():1 C:\Program Files (x86)\SenchaSDKTools-2.0.0-beta3\compat\scripts\phantomjs-jsb.js:299
The Verdict
Sencha says it’s beta, so I would be very cautious about building any production code base with it. Even if you can get it to build, I’d run a full test pass on the resulting code.