Ed Spencer's Blog

This evening I embarked on a little stellar voyage that I'd like to share with you all.

Near the end of last week's Sencha Touch 2 beta release blog post there was an appeal to the community to help raise awareness of a nasty flashing issue with Android 4.x phones.

Earlier today we released Sencha Touch 2 Beta 1 - check out the official sencha.com blog post and release notes to find out all of the awesome stuff packed into this release.

Sencha Touch 1 used the class system from Ext JS 3, which provides a simple but powerful inheritance system that makes it easier to write big complex things like applications and frameworks.

Today we released Sencha Touch 2.0 PR4 - the fourth and final preview release before we hit beta.

SenchaCon 2011 is drawing to a close and it's been another awesome ride.

I'm very happy to report that we released Ext JS 4.0.7 to the public today.

As you may have seen, we put out the first public preview release of Sencha Touch 2 today.

The inaugural SouceDevCon just wrapped up in Split, Croatia so I'd like to share a few thoughts on the last few days.

One of the classes that has a lot more prominence in Ext JS 4 is the data Proxy.

At the end of last 2010 we capped off an incredible year with SenchaCon - by far the biggest gathering of Sencha developers ever assembled.

Last time, we looked at some of the features of the new class system in Ext JS 4, and explored some of the code that makes it work.

Last week we unveiled a the brand new class system coming in Ext JS 4.

I recently gave an introduction to Sencha Touch talk up at Pivotal Labs in San Francisco.

One of the new components we just unveiled for the Ext JS 3.3 beta is PivotGrid.

One of my contributions to the newly-launched Sencha Touch mobile framework is the Touch Solitaire game.

Writing a library is a balancing act between the (sometimes competing) interests of API clarity, code clarity, performance and compressibility.

We pushed out a beta release of Ext JS 3.2 this morning.

A current meme that's floating around the JavaScript geek corner of the internet is setting quizzes on some of the more unusual aspects of JavaScript.

Jaml seems to have been getting a lot of interest lately.

This has been cross-posted from our Open Discussion Forum.

On January 1st 2010 I officially joined Ext JS to take over the role of lead developer.

OS X has a pretty little screensaver which takes a bunch of images and 'drops' them, spinning, onto the screen.

Sometimes we want to print things, like grids or trees.

Generating HTML with JavaScript has always been ugly.

The RowEditor plugin is one of my favourite Ext JS components.

Using git, you'll sometimes find that you're not on any branch.

For the second time this week I'm going to pick on the usually delightful Ext JS library.

The Module Pattern is a way of using a closure in JavaScript to create private variables and functions.

A few days back Praveen Ray posted about "Traits" in Ext JS.

One of the pages on the Ext JS app I'm currently working on has a form with a grid underneath.

The FizzBuzz challenge has been around a while but I stumbled across it again after reading another unique Giles Bowkett post.

The RowEditor plugin was recently added to the ExtJS examples page.

Over the weekend I migrated from Blogger (hosted by Google) to Wordpress (hosted by me).

We have a simple JavaScript class: function User(firstName, lastName) { this.name = firstName + " " + lastName; } We create a new User: var ed = new User("Ed", "Spencer"); alert(ed.name); //alerts 'Ed Spencer' alert(window.name); //undefined All is…

Sometimes you want to override one of the methods in ExtJS that return a configuration object - let's use Ext.direct.RemotingProvider's getCallData as an example, which looks like this: getCallData: function(t){ return { action: t.action, metho…

After my recent foray into printing grids with ExtJS, I realised I needed to print some trees too.

Sometimes you'll be using a Paging Toolbar on a grid and need to give the user the ability to change the number of records per page.

Grids are one of the most widely used components in Ext JS, and often represent data that the user would like to print.

Ext JS contains a function called Ext.override.

Ext JS has a number of handy iterator functions.

I have an article on Behaviour Driven Development for JavaScript in June's edition of the excellent JavaScript Magazine.

On Saturday I had the good fortune to be able to attend a conference entitled "Darwin, Humanism and Science", held at London's Conway Hall.

In JavaScript we have at least 4 ways of defining functions: function myFunction() { alert('hai!')

Update: Ext 3.0RC1 has included something like this, but called Ext.copyTo.

Say you have a simple Ext store: var myStore = new Ext.data.Store({ url: '/widgets.json', reader: someReader }); Which you put in a grid, along with a paging toolbar: var myGrid = new Ext.grid.GridPanel({ store: myStore, columns: [.....],

Adding a loading mask like the one on the ExtJS API application is a nice way of showing the user that something is happening while their browser downloads the source code.

I've been making a few updates to the ExtJS API documents application recently.

Update: We recently released the updated Touch Solitaire for Sencha Touch.

** Update 2:** I've recently cleaned up the bundle, removing stale snippets.