Ext JS 3.0 RC1.1 comes hot on the heels of the release of Ext JS Core 3.0. Ext JS 3.0 is built to sit on top of Ext JS Core 3.0. Ext 3.0 provides increased performance, consistency, flexibility and UI enhancements all without a significant size increase.

The new features of Ext JS 3.0 are:

• New UI components
• Row Editor
• List View
• Charting
• Button Groups
• Grouped Tabs
• Enhanced components
• Buttons refactored to be a valid BoxComponent
• Toolbar Overflow
• Menu Overflow
• Tooltips now support an anchor configuration
• Buffered Gridview
• Revamped Debug Console

Other improvements include Ext.data package enhancements, Accessibility improvements, Ext.Direct and the refining of memory management within Ext.

For more information: Ext JS 3.0

The long sought after Google Analytics Data Export API beta has finally been made available to the public. The API will allow developers to access the read-only data from Google Analytics in their own applications.

Any data that’s available through the standard Analytics web interface is available through the API. The Analytics API is a Google Data API. This is the same API protocol used for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools.  If you’ve used any of these APIs, the Google Analytics Data Export API will look very familiar to you.

Client libraries for the JavaScript and Java programming languages have been provided. Support for more programming languages is in the works. For any programming language you want to use you can make requests directly to the API over HTTP and access the data in XML.

To get started, you firstly need to get the documentation from Google Code. Here you’ll find example code, a developer guide, FAQ, and the complete API reference.

You can then sign up for the Google Analytics API Notify email group so you get the key announcements on feature updates, code changes and other service related news that relate to the API.

It will be interesting to see some of the inventive ways developers present the data from Analytics.

I’ve been using EXT 2.0 for some time now having created reporting systems and even a full blown Administration System. EXT produces Web 2.0 styled content all within your browser. Now comes EXT Core 3.0 Beta,  a subset of the soon to be released EXT 3.0.

The developers of EXT 3.0 have gone through the code, stripping out everything except for the core functionality, optimised the code and gzipped it to bring it down to a modest 25kb in size. They have also changed the licensing to use the MIT License (which drew some ire from some developers but was generally accepted by the majority).

Some of the features of EXT Core 3.0 are:

• DOM manipulation and traversal
• CSS management
• Event handling
• Dimensions and Sizing
• AJAX and JSON Support
• Animations
• Classical Inheritance Class System
• Observable Class
• Markup generation and Templating
• Timed code execution
• URL encoding and decoding

EXT Core 3.0 Beta core functionality contains:

• Carousel
• Lightbox
• Menus
• JSONP
• Simple Tabs

For those of you that need more extensive features, then EXT 3.0 is more your ticket. However, for anyone else who needs to put together a lightweight interface that has the Web 2.0 look and feel, then EXT 3.0 Core is definitely worth looking at.

For more information: EXT Core 3.0 Beta