Upcoming Book: Learning ExtJS

I've been rather quiet for quite a while now. I have a rather large side project I've been working on, written entirely with an ExtJS front-end and ColdFusion on the back-end. I'm hoping to get that into a QA phase in the next week or two. I also just celebrated my 39^th birthday, my 8^th wedding anniversary, my daughter is the rock star of the 1^st grade (pulling straight A pluses in every category), and the holiday's are coming.

On top of everything else, I'm putting the final touches on Learning Ext JS, to go to press at the end of the week/beginning of next, and due out in December. I've stayed relatively quiet on this, as I wanted to wait until PackT, my publisher, officially released information on the book. Let me start by saying that a few years ago I never would have thought I'd be doing this much client-side development again. And I definitely wouldn't have imagined me contributing to a book about client-side development.

I began looking at ExtJS quite a while back, while contemplating how to "jazz up" and modernize some dated interfaces I was supporting. I thought that ExtJS was an exceptionally well thought out library of rich, consistant components and functionality. While I use JQuery almost exclusively for DOM queries and manipulation, I really didn't find enough consistency in the visual plugins at the time (this has improved with the latest round of the JQuery UI plugins). I began to learn of the real power of ExtJS, and became an even bigger fan when it was announced that Adobe was including it in Scorpio, the codename for ColdFusion 8, Adobe's first implementation of the ColdFusion web application platform since it's acquisition with the Macromedia merger. Sweet! A total win-win for me.

Back in June, PackT contacted me. It seems they had started to develop a book, but the primary author, Shea Frederick, had gotten bogged down in other commitments before being able to complete the project. Some Googling on their part led them to Colin Ramsay and myself, through Cutter's Crossing. So they contacted me to find out if I was interested. The timing on this was awful. I was just starting the previously mentioned side project, my daughter was on her very first summer vacation, and just a lot of things going on. But it was too good to pass up. Aside from the fame and glory (yeah, right!), I knew that there weren't any other books out there on ExtJS, and it would be an excellent book to get out there for all the people trying to learn this exciting library. After talking the pros and cons with Aaron West, and getting sign off from my family, I finally contacted the Jedi himself, Ray Camden, to get some info on the writing process. We talked about time (a lot), commitment (more), and fame (maybe a little) and fortune (nearly none). I finally went ahead and said I would do it.

So, here it is almost six months later. I took on the final three chapters of the book: working with data stores (think like browser cached data table sets), extending Ext objects to build your own custom components, and the book wrap-up, which covers all the little stuff many people miss because they aren't typically visible. Only one chapter has any server-side code (the data stores). PackT originally wanted to convert my ColdFusion examples to PHP, to conform with the rest of the book. This morning the publisher told me that they want to keep my ColdFusion examples, to show that the ExtJS library can work with any server-side technology.

So, they're taking pre-order now, just in time for the holidays. Let me know what you think.