I love developing usable and rich web applications using the latest techniques available.

Ext 1.1 Beta 1

Ext 1.1 Beta 1 is available since yesterday, great news! looks like 1.1 final lies on our doorsteps.

Ext Stand-alone
Ext can now run on it’s own without a base library. The ext-base file weighs in at 34kb minimized. This is less than YUI utilities + adapter (58kb), Prototype/Scriptaculous + adapter (71kb) or jQuery + required plugins + adapter (62kb – minimized, not packed).

Since it can now run on it’s own, maybe one of the many “JavaScript Library/Framework” comparisons we keep seeing around the net will one day include Ext!

HTML Editor
A lightweight WYSIWYG html editor. You can see it in action here.

DateField enhancements
New flexible user input dates parsing and a new month/year selection implementation. Thanks to everyone for providing us with feedback on how it *should* be done! You can see it in action on the same forms page.

Ext.Ajax
A simple API for executing non UpdateManager handed Ajax requests. Internally all Ajax requests in Ext go through Ext.Ajax and it exposes global Ajax events you can listen for.

Behaviors
Ext.addBehaviors(…) allows for easy attaching of behaviors/DOM event handlers in Ext 1.1.

Improved API Documentation
Check it out and see for yourself. For everyone who has been making contributions to the documentation, thank you!!

06/06/2007 at 8:26 am — Comments (0)

Using JSON in CakePHP 1.2

May 8th 2008 – Controller::$beforeFilter has been deprecated a while ago, i’ve updated the example using Controller::beforeFilter()

Almost an half year ago I created jsonComponent for CakePHP, since then it has been used by quite a few people including myself.

About 3 months ago I started developing with CakePHP 1.2, one of the projects I’m working on is Pagebakery. Pagebakery relies heavily on AJAX and JSON and it’s therefore a perfect opportunity to experiment with CakePHP’s new features.

One of those features is Router::parseExtensions(). ParseExtensions allows you to parse the extension in your request and let Cake select alternate layouts and views automatically.
Another feature I found is JavascriptHelper::object(), this method is also available in CakePHP 1.1 but I only stumbled on it recently. It’s build-in JSON support in CakePHP, we no longer need the jsonComponent!

I’m going to explain you how to setup CakePHP 1.2 to output JSON with help of Router::parseExtensions() and the JavascriptHelper::object() method.
Read the full article

05/06/2007 at 12:48 pm — Comments (53)