Ajax Girl

Back when it was YUI-EXT the framework was immediately impressive because of the level of detail on the UI and look & feel. You could see that Jack wasn’t just thowing out code willy nilly. He was architecting a good looking overarching framework. It was consistent. It had nice touches. It just looked good!

Now we are moving towards Ext 2.0, and the team has announced new features in a preview that continue the tradition:

A common theme for the Ext framework is building rich web applications that can barely be distinguished from true desktop applications. Everything from the look and feel of a control to smooth transitions in DnD are considered when building out the controls. The Web desktop is a culmination of this effort and demonstrates how the use of standards based technologies such as JavaScript, CSS & DOM can be leveraged to build a desktop like experience within the context of a browser. Notice in the screenshot that modeless windows are being used within an MDI (Multiple Document Interface) paradigm to display data to the user.

Go ahead and play a little with the web desktop experience:

There are a slew of new features too, such as:

• Grouping & Group Summary: Ext 2.0 will introduce highly configurable single-level column grouping capabilities as well as summary rollups at the group level.
• Scrolling Tabs: By extending the Ext.TabPanel control with a new “autoScroll” directive, all tabs added to the panel instantly fall into the scrollable behavior of the tab panel
• Anchor Layout: The team extended the FormPanel component to allow form controls to be anchored to a specific position within a specific container.
• Column Tree: One of the requests that we’ve frequently received, and now implemented, is the ability to define additional display columns with the tree control.

You can see all of this in action. Let the guys know what you think. They are listening!

We also put together a very quick walk through of the features:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/152975424/ext-20-scrolling-tabs-anchor-layout-the-web-desktop-and-more