Hi Luke,
a bit of feedback:
this thing is ugly and confusing. I don’t know what it is, and i don’t know how it would ever help me create websites.
I will give you a bit of feedback on your feedback.
This was a “proof of concept” exercise to see if EE’s scripting language could generate a site using Sencha’s ExtJs 4.0 libraries.
I built the site in a few hours using only EE scripting. So, EE is capable of doing this but not in a very elegant way.
As for the “ugly” qualifier - I am a software engineer and not an artist. I was attempting to modify the standard ExtJs style sheets to change the look. As I said above, a proof-of-concept exercise.
To see some more elegant ExtJs samples go to this site:
http://docs.sencha.com/ext-js/4-0/#!/example
Expression Engine seems to be good for “simple” sites. By that I mean not “data rich”.
The two client sites that I am working on right now are:
1) an online data entry system for patient Medicare, physician, history, and insurance data
35 MySql tables of up to 30 columns each
2) an Internet telephone managment system for configuration, routing, billing and client profile
52 MySql tables of up 70 columns each
The back-end on both these systems in CodeIgniter, which I truly admire.
But Expression Engine would be completely useless for both of these applications because it’s jQuery interface just doesn’t have the sophistication to support complex data interaction.
What I was trying to do with the demo was show that EE could be used with ExtJs as well.
To me a “beautiful” application is one that works well - ExtJs is “beautiful” in this sense.
With EE you can certainly make “pretty” applications and you can make “big” applications.
But for “complex” or “data rich” applications, EE is woefully lacking.
BTW, an example of this is the EE “control panel” which IMHO is complete crap.
I have developed some automated tools based on CodeIgniter and Clojure Lisp for rapidly developing and deploying ExtJs apps. Perhaps I will post a link at some point.
Some applications are “pretty” with simple user interactions.
And others have “functional” styling with very complex user interactions.
I mostly build the second type - I wasn’t (mainly) concerned about making the demo “pretty”.
—Peter