CRM Demo

[jimbo]

Update: 4th Feb 2009

I've been putting together a CRM application based on Ext JS.

Check out a demo of some of the functionality.

http://host.softwherecrm.com


Update: 10th Feb 2009

There have been many fixes to the form designer. It is now working in Firefox. I also fixed a few ugly rendering problems that were going on.

Here's a short video of editing a form and adding a new field to it:
http://host.softwherecrm.com/videos/...form_edit.html

Next focus will be coming up with a nice business configuration for when users set up sites for the first time.


Welcome your feedback!

[Gunmen]

Looks really nice. The double click on e.q. a contact person takes a little bit time, too long (i.e. when the window appears).

Can you give some background information?
- Database? Server side language? Why did you choose these? And what is your motivation to build a crm application?

Thanks!

[henrikm]

Really impressed by the Form designer, good job. Im working on something similiar, more of a report designer.

[genius551v]

great work, tnks for sharing....

[sanchez]

Thanks, please continue shering...

[emendez]

Hi Jimbo:

Nice work, looking sharp. I'm interested however to know your experience so far with the applicatoin's memory footprint given the multiple Dialogs and, especially, Grids used. My exposure to Ext so far suggests that within a couple minutes of navigating through the different areas of the application, the browser's memory utilization will steadily increase. Only closing all browser windows will force a release. I played around with your app and observe similar behaviour. Is this your experience during dev/testing (or is it just me)? You know of a technique to mitigate this effect?

Thanks.

PS: anybody that provide answeres here, please chime in.

[steffenk]

Hi Jimbo,

first: great work, thx for showing us.
Some things i saw:
you should start with a loading mask - it takes a long time until page is load
The dialogs should be modal, there is strange behaviour if dialog is open and you click on a new dialog.
In FF there are some error messages that seems to point of wrong dom-elements/properties.
It's the better way to get this work in FF (still with the great firebug)
Your SS-xml looks like a mixture of xml and json - never seen that before.

May be some elements like dialogs had to destroyed after closing to free the memory.

[jimbo]

Looks really nice. The double click on e.q. a contact person takes a little bit time, too long (i.e. when the window appears).

Can you give some background information?
- Database? Server side language? Why did you choose these? And what is your motivation to build a crm application?

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. There are a couple of factors in it taking a long time to come up. I plan on looking at making it more seamless.

The database behind the demo is MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

There's a web services layer written in c# that exposes a group of methods, such as retrieve, save, delete, etc., plus some additional smarts like handling relationships between objects, user/role based security, auditing, etc.

The UI form, list and menu configs are stored as json blobs within xml.

The motiviation of building a crm app came from a mate who asked me to recommend something that he could use for his business with 4 staff. I had a look at what was available and couldn't find anything suitable. Still a little way off yet... but getting there - just have to keep the day job at bay!

[jimbo]

Hi Jimbo:

Nice work, looking sharp. I'm interested however to know your experience so far with the applicatoin's memory footprint given the multiple Dialogs and, especially, Grids used. My exposure to Ext so far suggests that within a couple minutes of navigating through the different areas of the application, the browser's memory utilization will steadily increase. Only closing all browser windows will force a release. I played around with your app and observe similar behaviour. Is this your experience during dev/testing (or is it just me)? You know of a technique to mitigate this effect?

Thanks.

PS: anybody that provide answeres here, please chime in.

Thanks! Yes, looking at memory usage is definitely on the cards. I'm observing similar effects, but I also have a bit of tidying up here to do that will hopefully restrict the rise in mem usage in the future.
At the moment, I

[jimbo]

Hi Jimbo,

first: great work, thx for showing us.
Some things i saw:
you should start with a loading mask - it takes a long time until page is load
The dialogs should be modal, there is strange behaviour if dialog is open and you click on a new dialog.
In FF there are some error messages that seems to point of wrong dom-elements/properties.
It's the better way to get this work in FF (still with the great firebug)
Your SS-xml looks like a mixture of xml and json - never seen that before.

May be some elements like dialogs had to destroyed after closing to free the memory.

Thanks for the comments. I still have a bit to do on the memory side. I’ll add in a loading mask as well. I started off using purely xml, but the json/javascript/EXT combo makes life a lot easier and json just happens to fit nicely into Xml nodes! Only using the json/xml combo for storing UI config. All customer data is xml based.