ExtJS
I've been developing with ExtJS recently. ExtJS cross-browser JavaScript library which enables the construction of rich applications using AJAX techniques. Now AJAX is all the rage and I've already done a proof of concept using Direct Web Remoting (DWR) but ExtJS is in a whole different league. It provides a whole gamut of GUI widgets to enable the building of simple forms to complex GUI applications. At RGIS we've recently built an ExtJS front end onto a data browser applications and the difference with the old HTML version is like night and day.
Programming ExtJs takes a bit of getting used to, or rather programming JavaScript does. It looks a lot like the Java I'm used to relies a lot more on techniques like functions passed as parameters. Okay if you've programmed Spring this has analogies. I've been working on a JCR 170 Repository browser for part of my Magneato CMS and I'll post the code later. Of course after all this hard graft I came across the Ext Filetree widget which does a lot of what I want. This is one of the problems with ExtJS at the moment. Although there is a vibrant community there are few tutorials, one of the best is Colin Ramsay's screen cast on DataViews and Uploading. I get the feel that Colin has a good understanding of how to work with ExtJS in an extendable way. The other problem with ExtJS is they can't decide what license it is to be release under with lots of changes and fudged LGPL versions. This is quite destablizing for anyone in the community who wants to use the toolkit.
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