Flexuous

I started working on a project a few months ago that leveraged the Ext JavaScript  library for just a handful of features.  After some requests for some improvements in one section I decided to try to leverage a little more of the Ext library to improve it.  I decided to start just by redoing a form to use remoting.   Now I’ve done this kind of thing before  in all of the  the Adobe Action-script platforms ( Flex, Flash and Air)  so I am rather comfortable with the basic concepts.    I am also very comfortable with JavaScript having worked with it for over 10 years and using DHTML and other tricks (img src updates, etc.)  to do Ajax type magic before Ajax was even in the lexicon. I will say that some of the conventions used by JS developers drive me nuts… but that’s all formatting.   One really completely new area for me was JSON.  I’ve always wanted to try it so I figured this was the perfect opportunity.  So I started with a simple task on this one form.   Populate a single Combo Box remotely from a JSON datasource.  Now when I learn to program a new language (or library in this case) I need two things.   The docs and working examples.    On the documentation side of things Ext has a very good API documentation at http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/docs/ The one area I found lacking was in the way of simple examples.    One thing I always liked from Adobe documentation was the examples that were included the docs.   Always very simple and always just focused around the one object you were looking at.    Ext has provided some really nice sample applications at http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/samples.html however it can be a bit hit and miss to locate the combination of examples that have the features you are looking for.   In particular I could not locate a single example that was just as simple as …. here is how you load JSON data into a combo-box.   I finally found a good one at  http://technopaper.blogspot.com/2009/11/dynamic-loading-of-combobox-using-extjs.html#comments I hope to leave some additional posts as I find bits and pieces here and there.