Jun 06, 2013, 3:38 AM
I found the book to be quite light but comprehensive in terms of understanding that wide variety of extjs controls and features. But I found it sadly insufficient when it came to really giving a hard discourse on layout topics.
Granted, the various Panels is an important set of controls to go over, but layouts are far more subtle and important to making sure users can even begin to quickly prototype any applications that use controls. If they get caught up just trying to get controls to appear, it will cause a lot of frustration and abandonment of the technology.
It's taken me a great deal of time to understand and address resize subjects. I had to breakdown and spend some time really realizing that there are two sets of attributes with every container. Some attributes affect the outer area and communicate up with the parent (Flex, column, row, ...) and other attributes that apply to the contents and its children (layout, body*, etc). I believe it is most important to start your communication with the reader here and explain these subjects in detail.
The LayoutConfig is also critical in this discourse.
I realize Chapter 3 does a lot to discuss the different types, but I would not start with borderlayout or anchor. Even though it's a great "hello world" starting point, they are still, more or less, specialized container with a lot of overhead that all the other standard UI will not necessarily use.
Everything in extjs is based around containers and unless you have a FIRM grasp on how to use them with the layouts like none, Vbox, Hbox, column, row, form, and maybe table, you're not even able to develop anything else in extjs imho. Spend more time on those layouts instead of Border, especially where it comes to nested examples with varying content size requirements, and things like Window will become very clear with minimal explanation. As will border, and anchor, and all the other special panels.
EDIT: Add some paragraph breaks
Granted, the various Panels is an important set of controls to go over, but layouts are far more subtle and important to making sure users can even begin to quickly prototype any applications that use controls. If they get caught up just trying to get controls to appear, it will cause a lot of frustration and abandonment of the technology.
It's taken me a great deal of time to understand and address resize subjects. I had to breakdown and spend some time really realizing that there are two sets of attributes with every container. Some attributes affect the outer area and communicate up with the parent (Flex, column, row, ...) and other attributes that apply to the contents and its children (layout, body*, etc). I believe it is most important to start your communication with the reader here and explain these subjects in detail.
The LayoutConfig is also critical in this discourse.
I realize Chapter 3 does a lot to discuss the different types, but I would not start with borderlayout or anchor. Even though it's a great "hello world" starting point, they are still, more or less, specialized container with a lot of overhead that all the other standard UI will not necessarily use.
Everything in extjs is based around containers and unless you have a FIRM grasp on how to use them with the layouts like none, Vbox, Hbox, column, row, form, and maybe table, you're not even able to develop anything else in extjs imho. Spend more time on those layouts instead of Border, especially where it comes to nested examples with varying content size requirements, and things like Window will become very clear with minimal explanation. As will border, and anchor, and all the other special panels.
EDIT: Add some paragraph breaks
Last edited by geoffrey.mcgill; Jun 06, 2013 at 5:03 AM.