Community Extensions Project

[ehauser]

While there are an amazing amount of useful extensions and plugins for Ext, there really is not a central place to find all the extensions that you can use. I am amazed at how often I randomly come across a forum post that contains a really useful piece of code for Ext. However, this has a number of problems:



You are not sure as the licensing of the source code
Difficult to figure out which is the latest release
Cannot always find live examples and/or documentation
No release build of the code; you often have to cut and paste into your project
No version control to see changes, comment history, etc.

To help solve this problem, I would like to start a community extensions project. There are a couple of goals that I think the project should have:



To get a number of existing extensions, plugins, and themes donated to the project (Get the code into source control)
Host platform specific integration components (.NET, J2EE, PHP, etc)
Release all of the code under a common license -- which I am recommending be LGPL so that the components could be used by ExtJS core if deemed appropriate
To have a nightly build process that produces an artifact containing source code, minified builds, examples, and documentation
Have a central site that hosts the live examples and documentation for the components
Begin to develop some of the wish list extensions (http://extjs.com/learn/Ext_Extensions)

I have set up a Google Code site for the project at http://code.google.com/p/extjstoolkit/. My hope is that others (especially those with existing components) would like join the project. I have a server that I am making available for use as a build machine and I have already setup a build process for doing nightly builds. I have not really reached out to anyone besides this post, but Colin Miller (who wrote a great Color picker component for Ext) has a couple of samples that he is working on contributing through some discussions we have had.

I hope their is some interest, and I am open to the direction of this idea.

[george.antoniadis]

I think that its better to leave this as a part of the learn wiki...
http://extjs.com/learn/Ext_Extensions

Having one more place to look for makes it a bigger headache... or is it just me?

Each plugin/ux developer can allready create a page for their thingie and also list them in the extensions...
ex.
http://extjs.com/learn/Extension:Yui_Color_Picker
http://extjs.com/learn/Extension:Select
http://extjs.com/learn/Plugin:RemoteValidator

As for the examples, that might be indeed nice, but many developers just post stuff they have coded for themselves and don't have much time to make examples, docs, release versions etc.
I really think the wiki is the way to go once there is a common place to stick in examples and stuff...

[DeeZ]

I agree with George. The Wiki is the best place to centralize/strore extensions. The real problem is the time needed to add new wiki pages after the great work done by each developer to create extension.

I think specific(s) member(s) of the extJS core must take the relay in these cases:
- to keep the real name of extension's creator
- to add the extension to specifics extension pages
- to add some explanation - just some - if they are not already present
- to create a link to the forum thread
- and last but not least, to create an online example when it's not available

Ok it's a great work to do that since it's necessary to follow new versions but for the ExtJS fwk itself, I think, it's a real great opportunity. I'm thinking about really great new extensions like "grid.dragSelector", "SwfUploadPanel", "LiveGrid", ...

So ExtJS core members team, what do you think about that ? :)

[dawesi]

http://www.ext-ui.com will have a theme and extension download galleries in early 2008. I've been working on this and keeping Jack and Rey updated. The site isn't live yet, but will be very shortly ( ie sometime in the next week ).

It takes time to build tools like this. I like your ideas. Maybe we should put a forum up on the ext-ui site now so that people can feed into the project.

Cheers,
Chris

[ehauser]

Chris,

If you already have something in the works that is great. Forums and wikis are great for discussion and information posting, but are really poor place for source code.

There are definately some positives to a gallery approach: It is probably easier to get people to contribute and releases are far less informal. The only downside is that they do not have to document their code, so it is hard to automatically produce Ext-style documentation.

If you need any assistance, let me know.