Monday, March 12, 2007

Why do I use Ext?

This is a long story and an unusual long post here at my blog.;
It all started when I had to do a slider like js to my company website. Since I was decided to not reinvent the wheel I remembered that I saw something similar in the recently released YAHOO library. So I went ahead and downloaded the library and had a very nice surprise.
Not only the code was very clean, but also very well documented. I had no trouble on making exactly what I wanted with the library.
Not so long after that I saw a blog ( I guess I was googling about YAHOO) that extended the YAHOO library to create a better way of using the animation part of it.
To be honest , that didn't interested me , but I saw that it was also a very clean code.
Not so long .. and I saw at Ajaxian that the same library had now a Grid.. and that caught my full attention. I went to the site , saw the grid and saw that it had the same flaw a million other javascript grids had,it had noway of using server-side code together with it and no paging.
So I decided to download the code and see if I could do it myself.
I was not very hopeful,since I had already tried to do that with several other grids, but their source-code was simply unreadable .
But jacks code was very clean and documented and in a matter of hours I had hacked the sort function to make an ajax call instead of doing it at client-side.
That made my day and made me certain I could implement paging. So I took a paging algorithm
I had developed in C# and converted it to javascript ( a no-brainer...)
And then it was born the paging grid for yui-ext and I had my 15 minutes of fame in Ajaxian.
Since then my website became an yui-ext showcase with samples and my love for the library grew more and more.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Way to go, bitch!

Anonymous said...

Hi Rodrigo, great idea and nice work and YUI seems to be the right way to go. I want to use the datatable in a Rails application, but unfortunately your example on Ajaxian is not working correctly (same with the examples of Yahoo). Sorting more than once on the same column is not possible and it never stays on the same pape. The filter is also not working and resizing on the last column is buggy. Seems that datatable is still beta ;-(

rodiniz said...

Hi ..I don't know much about rails.
But I do not use YAHOO datatable I sue Ext Grid ..that is way better that YAHOO datatable.