An excellent barometer of a project's growth and acceptance is the creation of community extensions that compliment the project. It's demonstrative of how users are embracing Ext and in some cases, need to go past what the core framework provides. It seems that almost on a daily basis, new extensions are contributed by volunteer Ext developers, most of which are of excellent quality and functionality.
Server-Side Initiatives
Ext is a client-side framework and is focused at providing a strong foundation for client-side developers. More and more, though, we're seeing demand from the server-side crowd to offer some form of support from within application server technologies such as ColdFusion, .Net, and Java. Another step forward in the community involvement model is when developers begin to offer integration capabilities for a framework into their own server-side environment. This is something that has really taken off and we've seen a number of server-side projects spring up to tackle this demand.
ColdFusion
With Ext v1.0 built into the Adobe ColdFusion 8 application server and powering most of the Ajax-enabled controls, it was obvious that sooner or later, CF developers were going to want to see how they could extend the built-in capabilities of these controls. Being Ext-driven, many developers soon realized that it was just a matter of looking at the Ext API documentation and leveraging the full capabilities of the Ext framework. Unfortunately, ColdFusion included Ext v1.0 which is substantially less feature-rich than Ext v2.0 and with no method of upgrading ColdFusion to the newest release, some very innovative developers took matters into their own hands and created extensions that provide a path to Ext v2.0. Following are three ColdFusion frameworks that have started the work of wrapping Ext into a server-side framework usable by all ColdFusion developers:
- Ext.CFC – Created by Brian Love, this was the first notable component that tried to provide server-side integration with Ext. We posted about Brian's work on the Ext blog in early December.
- cfExt – Dan Vega was next in line, coming up with a component class that would provide access to the Ext 2.0 windowing capabilities. Several iterations later and after a ton of community feedback, Dan released cfExt which has received a tremendous amount of positive feedback and support within the ColdFusion community.
- ColdExt – The most recent addition, ColdExt by Justin Carter, takes a different approach using a tag-based implementation to expose the Ext API to ColdFusion developers. This is actually a great way of doing things since ColdFusion's language, CFML, is mark-up based and the use of a tag library should make it very intuitive for CF developers to use ColdExt
As of this writing, Dan and Justin have been in contact and may take steps to consolidate their efforts into one nice project.
