Inspired by Sean McDaniel’s WindowBlinds extension, I’ve decided to work on Window Drawers. His extension is used in many places, including a contract in which we worked on briefly together. Sean provided a prototype of his code for Window drawers, which used some of the same code base as the blinds extension. His solution is very light weight, relative to my approach, which ultimately makes it faster.Click here to view the great (and configurable) example of Sean’s WindowBlinds extension directly from his site.

However, I wanted to take a different approach with the drawer solution, using Ext’s components, which provides the developer a means to use this as a generic panel, adding what ever they wish.

For now here is a snapshot and a teaser video.

Some remaining action items:

- Finalize Z-ordering issue (windowmanager, etc)

- Resizing for the window needs to be managed properly.

Ext 2.2 was dropped a few hours ago.  Some of the major features include a multi-select box and file upload button, both of which are amazing.  A new history manager is something that took a lot of us by surprise.  I cannot wait to start poking around with this.  Firefox 3 is now officially supported, which is a very welcome change :).  Great job to the Ext team for a fabulous release.

http://extjs.com/blog/2008/08/04/ext-22-released/