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Here are the latest news from ExtJS, as always they are pushing the limits of client tool programming far. Stay tuned for more news:

Exciting things are happening! Today, we’re combining forces with the jQTouch and Raphaël projects, changing our company name to Sencha, and moving our web address from www.extjs.com to www.sencha.com.

jQTouch and Raphaël are the leading open source projects in their areas, and we’re incredibly excited to have their creators, David Kaneda and Dmitry Baranovskiy, joining with the Ext JS team to form Sencha. We believe these collaborations will lead to some spectacular new things in the weeks and months ahead.

Few days ago ExtJS posted about their latest version 3.2 of their library. It was long anticipated because it is one of the coolest javascript libraries on the net. In fact ExtJS is the core to another tool we use on daily bases - Coolite.

Here are some of the new features:
- Multiple sorting and filtering on Stores
- Animated DataView transitions
- Composite Fields
- Slider improvements
- Toolbar plugins
- New Accessibility Theme
- Quality Assurance: Unit Testing

Full description and more information you can find on Ext JS blog at http://www.extjs.com/blog/2010/03/09/announcing-ext-js-3-2-beta-multisort-transitions-and-composite-fields/

Few days ago ExtJS team announced their latest release 2.2 of the popular library. Here is a small list of the new features which made me impression:

- CheckboxGroup / RadioGroup - Technically, while the individual Checkbox and Radio controls are not new, they may as well be, considering the overhaul they have had in this release. Gone are the ugly standard browser input controls, now replaced by attractive, visually-consistent Ext-ified versions (a long-overdue improvement). View example.

- History - Another component that has been missing in Ext is a browser history utility to enable history stack navigation within your single-page Ext application. The new Ext.History singleton makes it extremely easy to do exactly that, and it uses an event-based API to notify you when the browser history has changed. View example.

- MultiSelect / ItemSelector - These two components were contributed to Ext by community member TJ Stuart (thanks TJ). The MultiSelect is a traditional list control that allows for selecting multiple list items, and the ItemSelector combines two MultiSelects into a more sophisticated control that includes drag-and-drop list selection and bulk selection and deselection among other features. View example.

- FileUploadField - This is an official extension provided as a sample for implementing a useful form component. Not everyone needs a form upload component, but if you do, you can’t live without it. This control is fully styled and has an API consistent with other Ext form controls. It also supports both Text+Button (read-only text) and Button-only modes, and can participate fully in form layouts. View example.

- Full Firefox 3 Support
* Grid columns were visually misaligned
* Ext.onReady stopped working reliably (our desktop demo stopped initializing correctly)
* The DatePicker width ran off the screen, making the control unusable
* The TabPanel contextmenu event stopped firing, killing the TabCloseMenu extension
* Window dragging stopped working correctly
* Various minor visual inconsistencies

- Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes and Other Goodies
* New properties for differentiating Firefox version (Ext.isGecko2 and Ext.isGecko3)
* New support for deferred row rendering in the grid (the default), boosting render performance significantly
* Refactor of EventManager to improve how event handlers are managed, which should help alleviate IE DOM leaks
* Fixed the “small PNG’s can cause performance issues in IE7″ problem
* More than 100 additional fixes and improvements

Consult the 2.2 release notes to get a complete listing of all changes.
Download it from here.

Way back in February we posted about the upcoming Coolite controls. With great pleasure today I have noticed on their web site that the new version 0.5.0 is available for download.

Some of the new features include a whole bunch of new controls added as well as updated source libraries of ExtJS.

There has been a change also to licensing, as now we have both Community and Professional license.

I am really exited because I had my hands on it before it was released so I spend some time testing it. So far haven’t noticed a problem. You can get it from here.

Good work guys!

Couple of days ago new version of Ext JS become available for download. The changes are here:
* Full REST support
* Added Ext.StatusBar Component and Samples
* Added Ext.Slider Component and Samples
* Added Example to demonstrate Remote Loading of Component Configs
* Added Grid Filtering Sample
* Added Layout Browser Sample
* Added Spotlight Sample

View full list of changes here.
Download from here.

We were waiting for quite some time to see this happening. After having so big variety of JavaScript libraries it was about time to see one of them build in into ASP.NET controls. Coolite has the answer!

These guys are the creators of the killer app called DateJS which we wrote about way back in November. Now the continue with the good work and created Coolite suite. It includes:

* Powerful integration of the Ext JavaScript Framework.
* Full Design-Time support in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 & 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2005 & 2008.
* Drag-and-drop ease of use.
* Current support for Window, Panel and a many Form Controls including DatePicker, Calendar and HtmlEditor.
* New Controls being added weekly.
* Dual Licensed (LGPL 3.0 and Coolite Commercial License).
* Professional support options available shortly.

From the form controls they have included

* Calendar
* CheckBox
* DatePicker
* FieldSet
* HtmlEditor
* NumberTextBox
* RadioButton
* TextArea
* TextBox

Check out some examples here

GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. It uses GWT and Ext.

The company description above says it all. Nice set of controls which support Ext 2.0.

Check out some demos here.

I am quite excited seeing the latest Ext 2.0 Beta 1 released!

These guys are doing very serious job as moving the production effords further. The new beta comes with updated samples which are Web Desktop and my personnal favourite Portal.

2.0 Availability
The Ext 2.0 codebase has stabilized and several clients have begun to use Ext 2.0 in production environments. Ext 2.0 is available for download and code updates are available to SVN subscribers in the Ext SVN under branches/ext2.0.

The development of Ext 2.0 continues to move forward with some exceptional new features being rolled into the framework.

The team has really focused on enhancing the desktop-like experience that Ext already provides by introducing new functionality, improving performance and keeping the overall file size down.

New Features

Ext 2.0 framework and will make developing desktop-like application substantially easier. These include:
* Scrolling Tabs
* Highly configurable single-level column grouping capabilities as well as summary rollups at the group level.
* Anchor layout in forms to ensure a consistent size and position for form fields regardless of browser size.
* Treeviews that support additional columns for each leaf node.

New 2.0 Samples

Prior to this release, the demos for Ext were consolidated into the API viewer making it cumbersome to differentiate what was a demo and what was part of the API document viewer. We have now detached the demos and organized them onto a standalone page. The applications are also grouped into specific subsections to allow Ext developers to drill down into applications that show specific Ext functionality.

Portal Samples

Building dashboard-style applications similar to iGoogle or PageFlakes are all the rage so we’ve included a demo application as a foundation for building a portal application. The demo includes functionality for smooth repositioning of the portlets via drag and drop functionality and each portlet has the standard minimize and close functionality found in similar dashboard implementations. In addition, each portlet has a settings icon which is bound to a custom event handler and allows Ext developers to define behaviors that their users can apply to specific portlets.

More samples here