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I'd like to use ExtJS4 for my next project. However, I'm new to Ext and not that well versed in Javascript's finer points either.
There are a couple good books about ExtJS3 available. Should I learn from those old books first and then apply the knowledge to v4 or has the API changed so much that there is no point in learning the old one first?
If not, what's the best way to learn for an Ext newbie?
If you're wanting to learn ExtJS 4 right now then you're going to struggle for any good books on the subject because its only about 6 weeks since it was released.
There are great guides on the Sencha Website on how to migrate from ExtJS 3 -> 4 (this one for example) which might help you along the way if you choose to tackle 3 before 4.
In my honest opinion, the quickest way to learn ExtJS is to pick an example from the Sencha website and have a play around with it.
ExtJS 3 is a lot easier to learn than ExtJS 4 in my humble opinion. I've been using ExtJS for 3 years and thought that 4 was a big switch in thinking.
I finally completed a Tutorial series that demonstrates how to use the new MVC pattern and associations classes of ExtJS-4 with CouchDB by means of Peter Muller's software patch. The series includes an introductory write-up, several video screencasts, and some other resources. You can read all about it and view the screencasts here:
http://averydc.com/ee/index.php/blog/couchdb_extjs4_a_winning_combination
I probably made some mistakes and perhaps mis-spoke here and there, so please feel free to offer constructive criticism. You can post comments on my Blog post. My intention is to help both CouchDB users and/or ExtJS-4 users get a jump start with building an MVC client/server CRUD application using document databases as an alternative to relational databases.
Peter Muller created a software patch for ExtJS-4 and Sencha Touch that makes working with de-normalized databases much easier. I find it is a very maintainable solution for me. If Peter's software patch is something that will work for you, please request from Sencha devs that the patch be integrated into an official release of ExtJS-4 and Sencha Touch in the future. The thread is being watched by Ed Spencer, as he is curious to see the demand. To add your voice, get the patch, or report issues, please post a comment in Peter's thread here:
http://www.sencha.com/forum/showthread.php?127547-Sencha-Platform-denormalized-Data-patch&highlight=couch
Hope this fills a need... Thanks.
I'm also new to Ext and decided to start with Extjs 4 (However, we use extjs 2 in our projects at work!).
Last week I finally got the book Ext JS 4 First Look by Loiane Groner and took a look at it with the hope to find it a useful resource for learning extjs and get over it. But after a bit skimming through, I found out that the book is only suitable for switchers from Extjs3 to Extjs4 and is of no help to newcomers.
IMHO, learning with playing around with examples only gives you experience but you would gain no insight(But is the fastest way as Jaitsu indicated). In order to become an expert, you need to be an experienced develper with a great insight! So my suggestion is to learn extjs 3 from a book and then read Groner's book and begin playing around with the exercises simultaneously.
I bought the book directly from the Publisher: http://www.packtpub.com/ext-js-4-first-look/book
They even have an option of buying an e-book
Apart from ExtJS 4 first look https://www.packtpub.com/ext-js-4-first-look/book
there are couple of more books here:
ExJS in Action Second Edition covers ExJS 4.0
http://manning.com/garcia3/
http://www.packtpub.com/sencha-ext-js-4-web-application-development-cookbook/book
Book on extjs4 http://www.amazon.com/Ext-JS-4-First-Look/dp/1849516669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330388504&sr=8-1
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I wanted to get into full-stack JS development. I was about to start with the usual MEAN stack (MeanJS). I stumbled upon these articles:
http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/why_meteor http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack/
That are convincing. I am really confused how to get started. What are the pros and cons of using a frontend-backend-database framework like meteor over the conventional MEAN?
Due to the nature of the question, I'll try to answer it broadly. After using the MEAN stack for over 2 years and Meteor for a few months, I much prefer Meteor.
If you're just starting, Meteor has amazingly simple conventions. Try the angular-meteor tutorial to get started. Meteor offers one line installs, perhaps most notably including user authentication. You get the power of observables & latency compensation as a default.
The MEAN stack requires much more configuration and setup, as well as a strong developer foundation in Node.js. You have to do the work, but it may be worth it to understand the full stack. Much of what Express handles in dozens of lines of code can be handled in one line of code in Meteor.
Having said that, it is sometimes difficult to hack together Angular with Meteor. For example, I'm currently having difficulty using the new-angular-router with overlapping Meteor conventions. Consider MEAN has a much longer trusted history and wider support.
I think you are going to get a lot of opinionated answers, but to be honest every user is different and you won't really know until you try each out. I took a look at all the tutorials that were available for the ones that interested me.
ReactJs:
I was never a fan of reactjs, until the 3rd time I went through the tutorial, and thought this is kind of easy to get the hang of :
http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html
ReactJs is a framework by facebook and is doing pretty well. It works by updating the DOM and the syntax reminds me of that of programming a game. It uses states and props.
AngularJS:
I didn't prefer angular js as much because I didn't really give it much of a try (atleast more than twice). I was hypocritical about it. I thought of it as too much to remember and the tutorial I tried with it was this one :
https://thinkster.io/mean-stack-tutorial/
I think it is a great tutorial to get you into the stack. I can't say much about it but Angular 2.0 is coming out soon.
MeteorJS:
I never gave it a full go, but it looked interesting and from what I read, it was mobile friendly and great for single page app. Recently I've been following this tutorial:
https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack-clone-in-meteor-js-getting-started.
This is the next project I'm going to try to do in Reactjs(in meteor first).
I think its all really preference and you should just give all of it whirl. Some might be better at some functionality then others, some may be more syntax friendly, some may just be easier to use. All depends on the type of person you are.
Since Meteor is built upon NodeJS, it may be obvious that it was created to enhance development over the MEAN stack.
Meteor relieves the pain of writing hundreds of lines of code to accomplish a simple real time app, for example.
So if your question begins with "I wanted to get into full-stack JS development...", I strongly recommend you Meteor over MEAN.
At the end of the day:
"Meteor will be the JavaScript framework that will rule them all"
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I need to build a php app, and I was thinking about using a framework (never used one before). I've been browsing around some but most of them seems kinda complicated, I really liked what I saw about Symfony, but it looks like I will have to spend like a month until I really understand how to use it, and in one month I could code the app I have in mind 5 times without a framework. But I want to use one to "standardize" my code and prevent bugs.
So I was wondering if someone could share with me which php frameworks you think are easier to learn how to use.
My application will use mysql, and it will have some sort of "search engine" to search data that will be populated on the database using a few "scraper scripts" (that I also wants to code using the framework).
There are many questions answering this question here on StackOverflow and I was recently just in your position researching many different frameworks as I want to standardize my code as well.
I ended up choosing Codeigniter because I wanted something with good documentation, and that was very light (lighter == easier to understand IMO), and something that was not too strict. In Codeigniter if you really want to you can just code regular PHP and it lets you do that. I like this option because if I really get stuck on something, I just code it in raw PHP the way I know I can. I've only been using Codeigniter for a few weeks but the learning curve isn't too difficult and this is my first framework I've used.
Read through some of the previous discussions, and look out for ease of use advises:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2648/what-php-framework-would-you-choose-for-a-new-application-and-why
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249984/php-framework-decision-analysis-paralysis
Why do I need to use a popular framework?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/717836/kohana-or-codeigniter
If you want something easy to get started, you might want to look into the minimal frameworks:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/694929/whats-your-no-framework-php-framework
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/141945/lightest-possible-php-mvc
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3023818/any-procedural-non-oo-php-framework
But actually the big dozen are advisable if you want good documentation. Symfony and CakePHP are complex, CodeIgniter and the newer Kohana fork are beginner friendly. While there are many more to choose from. Pick a nice API, and maybe look out for one that explains the difference between MVC and MVP. Also for a lengthy list: http://matrix.include-once.org/framework/
My first choice would be cakePHP. Easy to learn, great documentation, api and a few good books:
Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional – David Golding (good; start with this one!)
Super Awesome Advanced CakePHP Tips – Matt Curry (good and free :-))
Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP – Chris Hartjes (not read yet)
Practical CakePHP Projects – Kai Chan, John Omokore & Richard Miller (not so usefull)
CakePHP is the best solution with a small learning curve.
I was in your shoes just 2 years ago. I personally chose to use Zend Framework. It's important to understand that ZF is built by the same guys who maintain and improve PHP itself! Just that gives it a lot more credibility.
When choosing a framework you should consider the following:
Size and Quality of the community - Being one of the most widely adopted PHP frameworks, Zend Framework (aka ZF) has the biggest PHP framework community; hence, most of the problems you will encounter will have already been answered. There are frameworks out there that are supported by just a few developers and if they happen to quit working on it, you're stuck with the latest version of the framework. This not likely to happen with ZF.
Documentation and Beginner Friendly - The ZF docs are pretty good, full of examples and beginner friendly. There's also a ton of tutorials and [quick start guides][2]. It's extremely easy to start up a new ZF app.
Investment - Sure you have to invest sometime learning how it works, but everything's like that in the software engineering world. You have to understand [OOP][3] and [MVC][4] before hand as well. Many people don't understand that using a framework to develop procedural-like code (instead of OOP) is defeating the purpose of... using a MVC/OOP framework! Therefore, it's important to grasp and master these concepts so you develop the best code possible. And by best code I mean
a) code that works
b) code that's easy and fast to understand and maintain.
This investment is well worth it since it will drastically increase
a) speed of development
b) speed of debugging and maintenance.
Also, take advantage of this moment in your programming career to also adhere to other common best practices (if you haven't already done so) by using:
a) Unit Tests - incredibly easy to integrate within ZF. Look into [Test Driven Development][5] as well.
b) An IDE - VIM, [Netbeans][6], etc
c) [Design Patterns][7]
d) Source Control - [Mercurial][8], Git, SVN, etc
e) Finally, keep yourself in the loop by [following what's going on the PHP world][9].
You'll thank yourself yourself in your near future! I know I did.
As no-one has voted for Symfony here i will and here's why. There are two types of frameworks, well a whole range actually but in the PHP/MVC area which is where we are in this thread there are Glue and Full Stack frameworks.
Zend and CodeIgniter are Glue and Symfony and Cake are FullStack.
Glue are the ones where you can pick and choose which components you can use and how much "standard" code you can use. These tend to have a gentler learning curve as you can pick the bits you like that help and fill in the more difficult bits with code you know.
FullStack means you need to use the lot and so the learning curve can be quite steep. Also with FullStack there can be a tendency to balk against the way something is implemented rather than just accept and flow with it.
Coming from a write everything myself background i initially favoured the Glue's but have now migrated to FullStack using Symfony 1.4 and 2 and Sinatra and Padrino. The extra speed and power the fullstacks give is not something i would like to give up.
One downside of CI is that it is built for php4 compatibility and so does suffer in a number of structural ways when you come to push the framework, Kohana is a fork that addresses this issue. And i dislike Zend because there are so many ways of doing the same thing that after a while the Framework seems almost irrelevant (Sorry personal rant)
At the end of the day use of a Framework is good because it adds a structure and can be a great aid to learning and the one to choose is the one you feel comfortable and are productive in.
There are many frameworks and several really cool frameworks.
After trying so many of them I think you should not start using any of them before finding best suitable to your needs.
You may find any other after choosing one so do not act quickly before choosing right one.
Before creating an application with a framework you should make exercises.
For me I started with CodeIgniter created one application and left second one in the middle, then passed to Kohana and started second application according to the needs.
CodeIgniter is the one that I prefer
The framework must have little learning and easy to expand. I am using http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/ for all my projects. There is no installation. Just has to point the frameworks naanal.php in your application's index.php and run it. The framework will guide you what to do. For the beginer, this framework is very useful to develop PHP applications. A sample application also available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/files/sample%20applications/wordpress_plugin_builder.zip/download
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Which Silverlight Control Set is better? Telerik or ComponentArt?
I have used ComponentArt, but I just reviewed Telerik and it looks like they might have better functionality for the same price.
If you have used both, then please let me know your opinion.
ive been using Telerik controls for about 3 years. at this point i dont plan on doing any UI work without them...ever.
Support team is amazing
large dev community
tight integration with VS
releases are in step with MS releases
NO LICENSE REQUIRED ON INDVIDUAL MACHINES JUST THE DLLS
i have no idea what the gent who replied they are difficult to install/unistall from a project is talking about...honestly. in regards to "replacing a radpanel with something light weight takes a day" they are built on top of aspnet ajax and actually have more features and performance wise (in respect to xmlhttp panel) they are much faster. aspnet does full page cycle its not even ajax its just a trick to surpress the page blink. same traffic can be seen in fiddler with or without them. much less with telerik.
as far as SL controls go. they are without any doubt the best on the market
The best solution that I have found is to try out Telerik's controls yourself and you will be happy:) They offer a 60 day trial period that can even be extended and you can get support during the trial period.
I've inherited codebases infested with Telerik garbage in the past, and I would strongly recommend avoiding their stuff at all cost.
The one good thing I can say about them is that it only takes about a day of effort to remove their terrible Ajax RadPanel stuff and replace it with something lightweight and sane.
I've not tried their Silverlight stuff, but having seen the quality of their other products, I don't plan on doing so.
I used Telerik controls for AJAX in my projects in the last couple of years and so far I do not have any complaints. My productivity boosted to a great extent and my clients are very happy with the results.
Jason, I do not know why you consider the Telerik AJAX controls as a low quality toolset - the ajax panels are simply wrappers around the asp UpdatePanels with some thingies that helps you manage async requests. Furthermore, their ajax manager is quite handy when you want to define declarative ajax relations through the designer or initiate ajax requests from the client and intercept them on the server with simplified coding.
I am beginning to evaluate their Silverlight toolset as well for some of my future projects and at this point my impressions are rather positive than negative (compared to ComponentArt).
Dick
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At company I'm working, new project will be started soon. I'd like to use Silverlight 2.0 but I need to convince my CEO and Photoshop/AfterEffects guy for using Silverligt for upcoming project. These persons are - let's say - rather Flash / Apple oriented, but for me as a .NET developer Silverlight seems to be proper solution :-)
I have a list of advantages from developer's point of view but I need to show for these non-technical persons any working demos .
These applications could be business applications, but the most important features are:
fancy graphics - not a developer manufacture,
comfortable and interesting UI,
functionalities which are difficult to implement in Flash
Thanks.
I find that folks really like Quince:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
One of my favorites is Centre des Usages:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
Telerik have a couple of nice looking demos of their controls
This silverlight showcase will probably have something you can use
There are some killer visual effects in SL3:
http://blogs.msdn.com/henryh/archive/2009/03/20/mix09-the-gratuitous-graphics-demo.aspx
That demo is pretty awesome. Be sure to mention out of browser support, which you can't do in flash (though I understand other adobe technologies support OOB). Other posts on stack overflow have pointed to there being more 3rd party controls for SL than Flash but I don't have any stats to back it up.
Surely you don't need Demo's of fancy graphics or comfortable and interesting UI's. Since this would be by design and would be implementable in Flash or Silverlight.
Surely things like the fact that existing programmer knowledge can be extended into the rich UI because you can reuse your .Net skills would be the key thing. Being able to deliver functionality rather that just "flash"....
The showcase above is quite good, but the argument is still going to come back from the people who are used to using flash by saying "Yea, but we could do that in flash".
You need to show them what additional functionality Silverlight would allow for which you are battling to implement using flash. The down side is that if you can not do that, and you have a company with resources that is already trained in building things in Flash, you may be better off staying with Flash.
Becoming more familier with Silverlight yourself would help you to explain the strengths of SilverLight and all the good things. Time for that Hello World Silverlight app to be created.
Most of the things that you can do in Flash/Air can be done in Silverlight and vice versa. even if they are some things you can do in one but not the other, they might not be applicable to your scenario. picking the tool is one task. Assuming you have picked Silverlight then comes the difficult task do you use Code Behind, MVP, MVC, MVVM, Prism, Caliburn, SLExtensions. and once you pick the pattern you use, you will soon find there are n-variations of each with no definitive guidance
I would say if dev's are familiar with .net go with Silverlight
I met the CEO of this company on Tuesday, so I have no prior affiliation or vested interest. (But, he was a nice enough guy, so I'll give him this free plug.) Both the apps you see on this page are pretty cool, and the first is a Silverlight app.
http://www.atamagroup.com/
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Second Life is fun to play with, and some developers are creating content there, but I was wondering what useful resources (if any) are available in Second Life for professional software developers.
Discussion groups
Education/training
Vendor support
Development-related presentations or demos
Professional contacts
To clarify: I'm not really looking for information on developing stuff for use in Second Life (although those answers are welcome). I am looking for pointers to stuff in SL that programmers would find useful for their real-life work.
They have a site about some of these uses: http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/api/
and some pages on the language they kind of grew: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal
Like you I find playing around with SL pretty interesting for recreational coding. One of the experiences that made me think there was something to it was trying to code a working clock in a sandbox (a general building area in SL). Other avatars would walk past and make suggestions and as there's a fair few coders around it soon turned into an interesting collaborative effort. If only it was that simple in RL. Some things just work really neatly in SL - I once implemented a swarming algorithm using a flock of 'birds' as the objects (which gives a whole new take on oops).
As to resources - assuming you're beyond basic coding level then you should be able to figure most things out from the LSL Wiki - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal.
There's an ebook - "Scripting Recipes for Second Life" by Jeff Heaton which covers the basics in a reasonably well laid out way. It's only a few dollars but probably only worth it if you've not done a great deal of coding elsewhere. There's also regular classes held in-world, but I believe most of these are at a pretty basic level.
For groups I've always found the Scripters of Second Life group very helpful with a lot of people generally on it. There's one called simply Scripts which is quite active too.
A couple of words of warning, LSL, whilst Turing-complete is pretty broken in several areas, lacks modern program constructs (and some older ones - like arrays!) and much of the 'black-art' of LSL is knowing how to work around the limitations, With the advent of Mono though this is likely to be a decreasing issue.
Also there does seem to be an assumption by the Lindens that if you want to do any 'heavy-lifting' code you'll do it on a server off-world and call and return results to/from SL. This isn't helped by the XMP-RPC implementation being very broken, although HTTP works fine (and generally better than might be expected).
I vaguely remember Dr Dobbs running some sort of ongoing "Programmer's Island" thingy in SL, but I can't find the reference right now.
Apparently some sort of "virtual conference" for software developers.
As far I'm concerned, I'm trying to contribute to the OpenSim project which is a OpenSource clone of the SecondLife server infrastructure, written in C# and Mono.
OpenSim is SL like, enhanced with many additional script commands, open grid protocols, with customized modules and plugins. It definitely worth a look if you dont already heard about it.
ControlBreak suggested this in a comment (I'm promoting it to an answer):
You can visit Microsoft Island. Presentations of new products are done regularly - http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=663#more-663
IBM, Microsoft and Sun are pretty active in Second Life and sometimes there are interesting presentations/demos to see. Some of those are great for networking and meeting people from those companies which work on products you're interested in.
There are several groups for Java, PHP and several other programming languages apart from LSL, however IMO they're not as good resource as other non-SL resources. You can get your questions answered more quickly on StackOverflow or IRC.
IBM held several interesting programming competitions - there was something with robots finding a way out of the maze by IBM, there are also robot wars and some other programming competitions in SL, however they are all LSL-oriented.
I think I saw a beginner PHP class once, so if you're interested in learning programming language from start, try searching events and you might find something; however those are pretty rare in my experience.
Look & Feel team Scripting, it's mine. Common 3D trouble is confusing camera center between camera or actor. A designer may think camera center is world when it should be actor.