Eric Hauser’s Blog

If you have not discovered extjs yet, then you are missing out. I’ve been working with extjs for a couple of months now, and I am very happy with the results — and so are the customers. There are a number of advantages to using Javascript UI components for your web application including:

• you do not have to recompile after every change (just hit reload)
• it does not matter what backend framework you are using — you just need to be able to post and retrive JSON or XML data
• it does not matter what view you are using (Freemarker, Velocity, JSP’s, etc)
• json-lib makes working with json-lib easy
• you can do a lot more functionality with a lot less code

The demo shows how to easily do dyanmic drop down boxes with extjs and using servlets to provide the JSON. I used json-lib to create the JSON.

Here are a couple of images of the demo. Just unzip the archive, run “mvn jetty:run”, and go to http://localhost:8080/. You have to have Maven 2 already installed and setup. I have a number of other examples on using extjs with Java including a nice tree reordering demo where I save the nodes to a Hibernate backend that I will try to find some time to post.