A Step-by-Step Guide To UI Components

In application development today, UI components are often the major building blocks of a software application. As a result, they play a fundamental role in ensuring compatibility and reusability across different platforms. UI components help promote positive user engagement. They enable developers to quickly build attractive user interfaces.

As you know, a component is a logical group or particular web element with specific functionality that you can re-use across your application. Due to their widespread adoption, there are currently libraries of several UI components on the market — each with a wide range of use cases to help you create anything you want to display in your application.

Ext JS is an excellent example of this. It consists of components like Buttons, DataView, Login Forms, Grid, Trees, Charts, and Calendars. This article provides you with a step-by-step guide to UI components.

Why do you need a UI component library?

A good UI component library will provide you with a collection of UI components that can streamline your development efforts. This means you can build your applications faster, without needing to reinvent the wheel by coding everything from scratch. For example, the Ext JS Kitchen Sink library offers you everything from simple UI components like Buttons and Login Forms to more complex components like Grid and Charts. 

Component libraries make developers’ tasks easier. With a UI component library, your developers can drag and drop ready-made and pre-tested functionality into your UI. As a result, they can develop your applications faster and easier. However, if your requirements are more complex, you can also quickly customize a component to meet your needs. In addition to giving you speed and convenience, using a component library also helps you maintain consistency across applications.

What are UI components capable of doing?

There are several things UI components can do. UI components control basic functionality like showing and hiding, enabling and disabling, centering in the main container. They also provide complex operations like drag and drop, floating, and docking other components. Each UI component is typically is the child of a parent UI component. For instance, all Sencha UI components are subclasses of the parent UI component Ext. Component. This is important because every child component adopts all the functionality of its parent. 

How to start with button components?

You can start using UI components in your applications by adding a simple component like a button. A Button component is a fundamental UI component used with other UI components. For example, you can use a button component to navigate to another page or make a decision based on a button click.

However, many types of button components can provide advanced functionality. For instance, Ext Js Button components have buttons containing links, menu buttons with dropdown menus, split buttons with icons and texts, and segmented buttons. Starting with simple components is an excellent way to form an understanding of how more complex UI components work when integrating them into your applications.

What do you need to do to bind data with UI components?

Once you are familiar with adding UI components to your application, data binding is your next step. Data binding is critical to making a component behave as you want. You can view data bound to a component using component config. There are also several different ways you can bind data to a component. Ext Js Dynamic data binding is one example of this.

You can also link bound data so that when one bound component changes, another component changes automatically as well. When it comes to components, data-binding can include connecting formulas, binding associations, changing states, chaining combo boxes, and chaining selections. Remote data binding can also generate data from external data sources. Overall, data binding is an important concept to understand.

How can you use grid components?

As your next step, you can start adding more complex components to your application. Grid components are a great starting point. The grid is a vital UI component. You can use it to efficiently load millions of data points onto a web page without significantly impacting your application’s performance. With grid components, you can add advanced table functions like filtering, advanced sorting, data visualization, analytics, and pagination. Using the Ext JS grid library as an example, you get access to grid functions like rows and columns, row editing, row expanding, and cell editing.

You can also use grid components like pivot grids to display summaries of large volumes of data in a table. Pivot grids open the door to building powerful data analytics applications that provide your users useful business insights.

How to start visualizing data?

Once you are familiar with the fundamental UI components, you can use UI components to create data visualization using different types of charts such as line charts, pie charts, and bar graphs. Ext Js offers a rich variety of charting UI components.

You can use basic charts and stacked, rendered, or multi-axis column or bar charts. In addition, Ext Js offers 3-D bar and column charts. You also can build powerful data visualizations with line, pie, radar, gauge, and box plot charts.

Are you ready to get started with Ext Js UI Components?

Ext Js UI components as examples, this article explains the UI component basics, from UI component libraries to components for data visualization. UI components are fundamental parts of modern web applications. They enable developers to use the same web element across all the UIs within their applications. UI libraries in Ext JS like grid and chart components are useful for almost any task. Simply put, they make development easier and faster. So start building powerful UIs with Ext JS UI Components!