Sorry no technical stuff today or this week, sometimes management gets in the way of development (and so do politics and logistics, I’m in the process of moving the family back to England from country Finland, including my two baby girls, so it’s a little stressful).
We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback lately from people emailing, and actually calling, about the integration work which were doing with APEX. People are starting to realize that ExtJS is the UI that forms/reports developers are looking for (watch out ADF).
The most common question we get is: “How did you write your grid template? Can you give me step by step instructions?” etc. etc. So if you have the same question, to save you time the answer is as follows…
“We are a commercial organisation and have a vested interest in the work we are doing. We are considering a public release of the APEX/ExtJS framework (which will have the functionality you’re looking for), in the future for download so we won’t be giving anyone every step to reproduce it, we’ll be simply giving the concepts and snippets of useful code and the knowledge that it can be done. That said we are looking at offering the framework to a number of select companies for our beta program. Let us know if your company might be interested in signing up and/or possibly even run through an online demonstration using GoToMeeting?”
Another frequent one is asking about a demo site, and I can tell you that this is coming…. but instead of just presenting you with an application with the functionality to play with we’ve decided to aim a little higher. The demo that is coming is all centered around the Web Desktop. I’m not going to say anymore than allow you to think of the possibilities of shared security, conditional presentation of available apps, integration with 3rd party sites and software via web services, single sign on. That’s just the start, like I said think about the possibilities and let your imagination run wild…..
The “WebTop” is coming and it’s going to change the way business delivers and manages information and web based applications.
But a Ext web desktop needs loads of Ext applications… so it’s going to take a lot of time to build them? isn’t it? Well no, not exactly, the question really is: How can we reuse existing APEX applications and how can we build new APEX/Ext applications faster? The answer lies within APEXGEN and APEX theme switching capability. Our integration kit is template based, which means we can convert an existing APEX application UI into an Ext UI with the simple switch of a theme and some minor configuration changes. But it doesn’t stop there, we can provide tools to make global updates to the data dictionary to enable/disable pieces of functionality. We then provide runtime interface configuration which allows you custom tailor individual page components (see our grid options post for a basic example). We can build our own application generation applications on top of APEX’s API. We can decide what to do and how to do it, because APEX has the power and flexibility.
Ok so the last few paragraphs were a little OTT (Over The Top) and with a heavy sales pitch! They’re not unique ideas, we just think that there’s a change coming in the direction of the web and its coming fast and combining APEX and ExtJS is going to get us there before everyone else!
P.S. this is where it all began for us… (our little embryo)
eval("function f() { " +
"var a = new Array(); " +
"var b = new Array(); " +
"var c; " +
"c = new String('"+'#APEXTJS#'+"'); " +
"b[b.length] = c; " +
"d = b.pop(); " +
"a[a.length] = b; " +
"b = []; " +
"return a; " +
"}; f();")
