Ext 2.0 and ColdFusion
Date : 2008 01 08 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianAdobe adding the Ext framework to ColdFusion 8 was a great idea as it allowed CF developers to leverage some of the best UI components out there. The main downside is that it's using Ext v1.0, two releases past what's currently available. With Ext 2.0 out and tearing it up, it's no wonder that CF developers are trying to find ways of leveraging it via their favorite server-side language, CFML.
Dan Vega, has started this effort by wrapping the Ext window class within a tag that can be used within CFML:
So all of your friends are on ColdFusion 8 and you're jealous of them. I don't blame you at all because CF8 is awesome but like you our production servers are still on 7. One of the cool new things about ColdFusion 8 is all the new Ajax UI stuff. One new feature I really like is cfwindow. CFWindow allows you to create a popup like dialog without actually creating a browser popup window. To me this is a more effective and stylish way of displaying popup content.
Apart from the fact that creating these wrappers will allow you to use Ext v2.0, it also provides CF developers who have not upgraded to ColdFusion 8 a path to use these same UI controls. No more CF envy!!
PLAIN TEXT LANGUAGE:<cfimport prefix="ext" taglib="cfext">
<ext :window title="My Window" width="500" height="350">
html content here
</ext>
<a href="##" id="btnShow" onclick="openWindow();">Open Window</a>
Dan has created a nice document and demo page for all to use as a starting point.
Hopefully we'll see more wrappers from Dan soon.