Performance Improvements
Portions of Ext JS have been refactored to optimize performance including core functionality which will benefit the entire library. Many people will see significant performance gains when upgrading to 2.1 from 2.0.2. The typical Ext JS application will use much less memory, and many applications will see a memory usage improvement of over 300%! 2.1 is fully backwards compatible.
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Slider
The slider component supports vertical and horizontal orientation, incremental snapping, tooltips, custom styling and a lot more. Check out the new slider example page.
StatusBar
The StatusBar can be rendered into any panel or window, providing a standard area for status text and icons indicating what’s happening in your application. The StatusBar supports automatic “busy” notification for indicating in-process activity, and can also be easily extended and customized as in the screenshot below. It also supports all standard Toolbar items. Try out the interactive example yourself (there’s also a great new example of customizing the StatusBar via a form validation plugin).
First-Class REST Support
Developers using a RESTful architecture will be excited to know that Ext JS now has full support for all HTTP verbs (no longer just POST and GET). We’ve also added support for passing in additional header information to ease integration with server-side platforms.
Examples and More Examples
We have added a much improved example explorer for Ext JS, in addition to a brand new one for Ext GWT, along with the site re-design. You can find several new Ext JS examples indicated by the red “New!” text appearing by the description. There are several notable new examples that you may have missed:
![Grid Filtering](http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/shared/screens/grid-filter.gif)
Grid Filtering: Filter your grid using specifically-typed filter controls that plug directly into the grid header. Special thanks goes to community member ambience for contributing his user extension so that it could be distributed directly with Ext JS.
![Layout Browser](http://www.extjs.com/playpen/screenshots/blog/layout-browser.gif)
Layout Browser: Includes examples for each standard Ext layout, several custom layouts and combination examples.
![Custom Drag & Drop](http://www.extjs.com/playpen/screenshots/blog/dd-zones.gif)
Custom Drag & Drop: Enabling drag and drop between a DataView and a grid using DragZone and DropZone extensions. Thanks goes to Nige “Animal” White for putting together this sample.
Consult the 2.1 release notes to get a complete listing of all changes.
Ext GWT 1.0
Ext GWT 1.0 is a java library that enables developers to create web applications built in pure java. You can leverage your existing java skills to create full featured applications in java using your favorite java IDE and tools. Code, debug, refactor, and test your Ext GWT applications as you would any other java application.
Ext GWT has a number of high performance, customizable widgets that provide a great foundation for building your applications. Let us worry about cross-browser issues, html and CSS. Ext GWT is more than just widgets. Ext GWT includes a convenient model abstraction allowing your domain object to be passed transparently between server and client side components. Building a complex application? Ext GWT includes a hierarchical MVC implementation with full history support.
Ext GWT is a native GWT solution using the latest GWT release and takes full advantage of GWT 1.5 and java 1.5 features.
Ext GWT includes:
- High performance, customizable UI widgets
- Full theming support with standard CSS
- Well designed, consistent and fully documented source code
- Native GWT solution with no external JavaScript or 3rd party libraries
- Full remote procedure support using GWT RPC, JSON, and XML
- Support for java 1.5 features, including generics, enums, and varargs
GPL License
Until version 2.1 Ext was released under it’s own license, the “Ext License”. That license granted usage (provided certain conditions were met ) under the LGPL license terms. The CSS and images (”Assets”) distributed with Ext before 2.1 had a license all of their own which was not open source compatible at all. We received quite a bit of negative feedback from some prominent members of the open source community about our license not being friendly for open source projects. Some even said Ext was not open source at all since these licenses did not offer the same freedoms that standard open source licenses offer. Since we have been an open source company since our inception, these comments and concerns struck home and we felt a need address the issue.
We are pleased to announce that all of Ext JS 2.1 is now available under the GPL v3. We anticipate this will allow broader usage in open source software and should make licensing questions and choices much easier. To help answer general questions people may have, we have added some useful pages to the extjs.com website: Licensing Overview and Dual Licensing Model.
Ext JS 3.0
We are also pleased to announce that an early rev of Ext 3.0 has hit the SVN trunk! This is pretty early code (release date expected towards end of ‘08) but here are some demos to give an idea of some of the things we have already added. We have big plans for Ext JS 3.0 and I think it is moving in the right direction!
ListView
A high performance tabular view based on the DataView class for when a GridView is overkill.
Button
New super-flexible button implementation.
Toolbar
New grouping in toolbars and enhanced button support.
Toolbar Overflow
Dynamic overflow of toolbars to a menu similar to expected behavior on Windows.