My technical adventures, hacks or what I do in my free time.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Javascript and ExtJS

Been doing something new for the last two weeks. I started researching on ExtJS and felt that I need to learn Javascript properly before trying to understand how ExtJS works. It's a very nice toolkit or framework or whatever is called. I tried with dojo 1.0 but it's too complex and lack of documentation forced me out. JQuery is uber cool but lacks widgets. We go for javascript only for the widget collection and dynamic manipulation which is currently absent in JQuery. Mootools is promising but I found I lacked intelligence to understand it. I don't know why. There is a good tutorial in clientside.cnet which helped me during the intial learning curve. It lacks one important panel (for layout) and so I had to discard it.
ExtJS is improving but will have some serious trouble in adaptation as it grows. First one is the license. Documentation is not as good as I expected. A dojo book like doc would help lot of web developers to learn and master ExtJS. Charting engines are missing. It's very important for any serious application to have some charting capability (Because the managers need it :-). I have heard that open flash can be combined with ExtJS but where are the tutorials. Are there any or am I not searching properly?