I often see technology out there that is solid, but lacking a tiny bit of the details from a UX perspective. Or I would like to extend it a little bit more for a UX reason. When that happens, every once in a while, someone tells me I am “complaining” and says, “Why don’t you just learn to program and do it yourself?”
I always feel uncomfortable with this. Programming has been this glass ceiling for me for 12 years now. I have dabbled here and there, but always get stuck and move back to shallower waters. With the previous Tree UX example, this happened again. It certainly was not meant in a mean way at all. I think the guy is encouraging and well-intentioned, and I appreciate that. So I took another look at EXT’s samples page. I want to compare apples to apples.
So my next mini-project will be to create the exact same thing twice. I am going to choose Tabs. I know how to do Tabs with jQuery. I am going to try the same thing in EXT, which I “claim” is harder. But until I do it myself, I can not compare them properly. I will post the results as soon as I have it.
3 replies on “Dabble Dabble, program and trouble”
For what it’s worth, I’m a developer and I also think Ext is more difficult to penetrate than, say, jQuery.
For me, a lot of that has to do with the fact that I learn best by example and there are no straightforward examples in the Ext documentation. There are a number of fairly complete, fairly feature-rich sample applications, but that forces me to dig though a lot of code just to understand one interaction. It’s still very doable, but the lack of simple-case example documentation makes it more difficult than it could be, I think.
The API documentation itself, though, is amazing for such a complex beast. Every time I look at it I’m astounded by the amount of time, effort and energy that has been put into documenting the system components.
Although I am picking an easy one, check out the tabs code.
http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tabs/tabs-example.js
It doesn’t look that bad at first blush. I need to do it though and see. File size is big, but I think I “could” get a smaller footprint…need to ask about that.
I’ve also found Ext hard to learn, but I’m always so pleased with the results I think it’s worth my time.
The worst part of Ext to learn has to be Drag and Drop.