Ajit Kumar - Sencha Touch Cookbook

Ajit Kumar started his IT career with Honeywell, Bangalore, in embedded systems and moved on to Enterprise Business Applications (such as ERP) in his 11 years of journey. From day one, he has been a staunch supporter and promoter of open source and strongly believes that open source is the way for a liberal, diversified, and democratic setup, like India.

He dreams and continuously endeavors that the architecture, frameworks, and tools must facilitate the software developmentat the speed of thought.

Ajit holds B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Bihar Institute of Technology and has co-founded Walking Tree, which is based out of Hyderabad, India. This is the place where he plays a role of CTO and works to fulfill his vision.

I would like to thank my wife, Priti, my sons, Pratyush and Piyush, who were very patient and supportive; my business partners, Alok and Pradeep, who, relentlessly, talk about the book; friends who always encouraged me; the reviewers and all the people behind the Sencha Touch project and other open source projects.

Kristian Kristensen is an independent software development consultant. Through his company, Whiz IT, he takes on the role of a teacher, coach, facilitator, and anything in between to help software shops improve their processes and skills. He is particularly interested in languages and the way they shape our thoughts and problem-solving abilities.

Kristian worked as a consultant for Microsoft before embarking on the journey of freelance consulting. He holds a Master's degree in software engineering from Aalborg University and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife.

Matthew Makai is a software development consultant with Excella Consulting in Arlington, Virginia. He works on application development with Python and Java using the Django, JQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, and PhoneGap frameworks. He is interested in enhancing personal and business decisions with mobile applications and data visualization. Matthew earned his Computer Science B.S. at James Madison University, his Computer Science M.S. at Virginia Tech, and his Management of Information Technology M.S. at the University of Virginia.

Matthew writes about consulting and solutions to technical problems on his blog at http://mmakai.com/.

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Preface

Sencha Touch is a HTML5-compliant framework for development of touch-based applications. An application written using this framework can be runwithout any changeon iOS, Android, and Blackberry-based touch devices. The framework comes along with numerous built-in UI components similar to the ones that we see on different mobile platforms, nicely designed with efficient data package to work with varied client-side or server-side data sources. In addition to this, the framework also offers APIs to work with DOM and it brings in the extensibility to every aspect of it, which is a bingo combination that every enterprise looks for and expects from a framework.

What this book covers

, Gear up for the Journey . This chapter is all about setting up the right development environment for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. It covers the detailed step to set up the environment using which we can build and test our application, either on a browser or on an emulator or a real device. The latter half of the chapter covers the Sencha Touch APIs that can be used to detect what device our application is running, what platform the application is running, what features are offered by a platform, how to handle orientation change, and build profiles for different platforms or devices and let our application configure itself using those profiles.

, Catering to your Form Related Needs . This chapter covers every aspect of a form, including the different form fields offered by Sencha Touch, configuring each one of them for the user in a form, and configuring ways by which a typical form validation can be done. Fields such as Search, E-mail, DatePicker, Select, Slider, Checkbox, TextArea, FieldSet, and so on are covered in this chapter along with their detailed usage.

, Containers and Layouts . Containers contain one or more child items, and layouts help us position our content properly on the screen, and this chapter is all about them. It covers what are the different types of containers and layouts available with the framework and their behavior, which is a key point in developing an application where we would have nested containers, each one of them having their own layout to position their children on the screen.