Re: AJAX based data grid for Rails App? Is there any code/approach I can leverage?

Peter De Berdt
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:41:33 -0000

On 04 Apr 2008, at 11:21, Greg Hauptmann wrote:

> Excellent - thanks guys.
>
> From a brief looks it seems ExtJS is much nicer (finishing looks
> excellent) than ActiveScaffold.   However should I be concerned that
> ExtJS isn''t a Rails plugin?  Would ActiveScaffold fit the Rails
> approach better in terms of how its AJAX prototype support is built
> into the controller/views *.rjs etc?  Or is this really not a
> concern?   (I''m thinking of starting to jump into ExtJS but
thought
> I''d ask for advise first)

If you''re going to work with extjs, there are a couple of things you
need to be aware of:
- extjs is an entity in itself, it''s not part of rails and as such
isn''t tightly coupled into the framework
- extjs is a pretty hefty library
- extjs is a javascript library, you build your interface through
javascript. no javascript = no extjs
- if you want extjs to follow Rails'' restful conventions for updating
a record, you''ll have to manually add the _method=put parameter to the
post parameters, same goes for deleting a record
- you''ll have a lot more work than using something like
activescaffold, but extjs does provide more flexibility
- you''ll have less work than writing a full javascript component by
yourself (which you could do if you find extjs not up for the job or
just think you can do a better and less hefty job)
- check the extjs licensing scheme if you want to use it in a
commercial project


Best regards

Peter De Berdt