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

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