The process of creating rich web interfaces has gotten way, way easier thanks to the release this month of ExtJS 2.0. Yeah, it’s heavy as hell (the minified core JS weighs in at nearly half an MB, and the non-minified debugging file at just under 1MB), but the abilities ExtJS gives you are simply amazing. Collapsible panels, tabs, animated transformations are all there out of the box and run pretty much without major hiccups. It’s got the GUI interface conventions you may be used to if you’ve done that sort of programming before—event handlers and listeners, data stores, initializing, etc.

We’re using this on the build-out we’re doing for Webstrong Group’s platform. The work is starting out as a mod to Mephisto, and the interface will tie in with a REST service we’re building to be the connective layer between the CMS and several web services — most notably SalesforceCRM and ExactTarget

Honestly, the spec that I built for this UI was pretty ambitious. It includes all kinds of edit-in-place and drag/drop stuff that can be pretty dicey to debug on most JS frameworks. I was thinking that I would have to either give up on some features or spend a lot of time hacking through a bewildering forest of stubborn JavaScript errors. ExtJS has not only eliminated those fears, but has gone one step further—I’m now free to think about extending the core CMS interface in ways that hadn’t even occurred to me before. Example: I’m relatively certain that we’re going to bolt the WYSIWYG form editor onto the Mephisto core article editing screen. It just feels a lot better than TinyMCE, which is just to Wordish IMO.

I’d love to avoid the WYSIWYG problem all together, considering how finicky they can be in web deployments, but it turns out that clients buck like a rabid horse at the idea of using something like Textile to style blog/page entries. So WYSIWYG it is. With ExtJS, it seems like that won’t be all that painful to make happen.