ColdEXT Helps With Consistency!
This week I found a gem and cannot put it down, I want to tell everyone! Justin Carter just made my use of the EXTJS library a lot clearer with his ColdExt tags. Everyone else seems to know about this already, but I didn't and just wanted to sing its praises.
I have a current application that uses EXT 1 and over the next 2 months I will be making major updates using EXT 2.0+ and this will really come in handy.
You cannot do everything with these tags and I have hit a few limitations but from what I can tell it's still a work in progress and if something is missing, you can use script directly within the tags so it does not really matter.
For me ColdExt looks like it will help me keep consistency with EXT 2.0 a little better than before, keep up the great work Justin Carter and if you read this, thanks for sharing!
SalesMaxx v4 screen shots using a mix of ColdExt
The tags do have some small limitations but the beauty is that once you understand how the Ext components work (their attributes, methods and events) your knowledge becomes transferable to doing things in directly JavaScript, if you really need to. (In fact some people have commented that they have used ColdExt to quickly flesh out the structure of part of their UI and then copy and paste the generated JS, reformat it in their IDE and continue coding in JS!)
The tags seem to work really well for a UI library like Ext JS though. Some of the examples would expand say 15-20 lines of CF into over 100 lines of JavaScript (when formatted in a readable fashion). I think that says a lot for the power of tag libraries in ColdFusion. I'm all for productivity gains :)
These tags really are a time saver and I wanted to spread the word! The possibilities for these tags are good and I hope people pick up on them. At the moment I like your tags over the CF8 built in ones. Some of CF8 AJAX tags which uses the Yahoo libs not EXT CFMENU does I think. CF does not really have any built in good tags for tree or menu which uses EXT. (I think cfmenu has some of the worst markup I have ever seen for a simple CSS hover menu!)
It would also be interesting to see if these tags could be added as plugins to some frameworks like ColdBox.
What I did see what a big improvement in speed over the CF8 built in tags its the same speed improvement I see when I use just EXT script.
Anyway keep up the good work and if I can provide feedback I will. I will see how the tags work out after I finish this project.
Glyn