Constructing Alert Boxes and Wait Bars with the Ext JS Library

Introduction

Third-party JavaScript frameworks aimed at facilitating the development of Rich Internet Applications have proliferated. This has significantly changed the way that many developers build web sites. Nowadays, there's no need for you to spend many sleepless hours creating a professional-looking user interface; you can pick up one of these useful packages and let it do the hard work for you.

Among the various JavaScript frameworks that can be used to build full-featured JavaScript applications, there's one that very probably will catch your attention as fast as it caught mine. Given the title, you already know that I'm talking about the Ext JS library. This package comes with an impressive set of features that permits you to construct all sorts of confirm and prompt boxes, progress and wait bars, interactive forms, web site grids, an so forth, by means of clean, unobtrusive JavaScript code and structural markup.

Of course, if you've read the first two parts of the series, then you're well aware of the remarkable functionality of the Ext JS framework when it comes to building highly interactive front-ends. In those particular tutorials, I explained how to use the methods provided by the library to create some confirm and prompt boxes, and a good-looking progress bar as well.

In those cases, all of the web-based widgets were constructed with only JavaScript code, and no additional markup. However, as I mentioned earlier, the Ext JS package can build many other message boxes, which can be easily constructed by means of some intuitive JavaScript methods. Thus, in this third chapter of the series, I'll be showing you how to create alert boxes and wait bars with the API provided by the Ext JS framework.

Now that you know what to expect from this specific tutorial, it's time to get rid of the preliminaries and continue exploring the solid capabilities of the Ext JS framework, this time to build the aforementioned web widgets. Let's get started!