Who Ext Designer is For

Ext Designer works on two levels–as a prototyping tool as well as a code generation tool. Particularly for complex UIs, it saves tens of hours of development time that are normally spent tweaking layouts and making sure that nested elements play well together. Best of all, (and unlike most prototyping tools), it produces clean, object oriented code that looks like the code you would have written yourself.

We think that Ext Designer will be a great tool for both single developers and teams working together to build applications. The drag and drop interface can be used by anyone involved in the design of an application. A project can easily be started by a business analyst, passed to a user interface designer, and finally handed off to the development team to be enhanced with functionality—saving time every step of the way. We’ve even used Ext Designer to build parts of Ext Designer!

Features

The main screen of Ext Designer allows developers and designers to assemble layouts by dragging and dropping components together. They can quickly change the layout of a specific component, or use the inspector to manipulate more detailed properties.

In addition to components and the visual side of an application, there are also several new ways to incorporate and configure data stores. These data stores can then be bound directly to components like DataGrids and Trees. Whether your data is in JSON, XML, a simple Javascript array, or an Ext Direct connection, Ext Designer can help you build a data store for it faster than ever.

Once the application design is finished, code can be exported on a component-by-component basis, as either JSON or Javascript classes. Again, this code is still Javascript, so it can easily be extended with the IDE of your choice.

Interface

Those who have seen early previews of Ext Designer are in for a nice surprise. We’ve completely redesigned the application for final release, giving it a whole new level of polish. In addition to a better look and feel, the new product chrome looks separate and distinct from the actual interfaces you are creating, which we think will prove very helpful.

All in all, we have truly put our hearts into Ext Designer and we hope you’ll find it as useful as we have. We will be hosting some webinars soon, but download Ext Designer today and try it out for yourself!

What’s new

While the beta announcement covers most of the details of the new release, a few additional changes made their way in between then and now:

• Ext.ux.SliderTip has been incorporated into the library as Ext.slider.Tip
• Ext.ux.form.SliderField has been incorporated into the library as Ext.form.SliderField
• Significant performance improvements to the Box Layouts, resulting in a 25% speed increase in many cases
• Performance improvements to AnchorLayout and ColumnLayout
• New Themes Viewer example
• Updated Charts
• 60 bug and enhancement tickets have been closed since the beta release

Click here to see the rest of the release post…

Check it out at extjs.com