James Carr

With my recent interest in extjs, I was playing with the idea of making a Struts2/WebWork component library or a tag library to handle a lot of the boilerplate extjs code (i.e. creating layouts and such) but, luckily, discovered someone beat me to the punch!

I randomly came across ExtTLD this morning while sifting through my rss feeds, and I must say I am rather impressed. Although I consider myself a pretty good javascript developer, there seems to be a lot of java developers who aren’t that hot at javascript… which is why whenever I attend any java related conference there is always several sessions touting “javascript free ajax!” frameworks like GWT, Ajax4JSF, or IceFaces. Although I’ve always been skeptical of such frameworks, I do see their benefits… especially for the java developer who excels at serverside JEE development but generally sucks when it comes to adding javascript behavior to the presentation layer.

So far it looks good, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Basically, I’ll have to see if it passes my “good javascript generator framework” test. I’m a pretty staunch advocate of unobtrusive javascript, and generally hate any presentation layer framework that seeks to dump several hundred (or thousand) lines of javascript inline in the html document. This is the reason I totally hate Struts 1′s client side validation plugin.