Sencha Touch in Action

by Jesús García, Anthony De Moss, Mitchell Simoens

Summary Sencha Touch in Action is the definitive guide to developing applications with Sencha Touch. You'll begin with basic design principles for building great mobile applications, and then explore the features of Sencha Touch that bring those ideas to life. You'll learn how and why objects operate in the framework as you work through several real-world examples. This book also promotes the emerging best practices for mobile web development, from widget implementation to developing an application with the Sencha Touch MVC framework. Updated for Sencha Touch 2. About the Technology The Sencha Touch framework makes it easy to build cross-platform mobile apps using HTML5 and JavaScript. It offers numerous features that mimic native mobile APIs and an MVC architecture that feels right at home for application developers. So you get the power and richness of native apps and the convenience of standard web tools. About this Book Sencha Touch in Action is a complete guide for developers of native-quality mobile Sencha Touch applications. You'll explore real-world examples as you master this impressive framework from the ground up. The book shows you good practices for mobile web development, from widget implementation to the structure of MVC applications. The book requires basic JavaScript skills. It assumes no experience with Sencha Touch or Ext JS. What's Inside Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Authors Jay Garcia is a popular speaker, Sencha community advocate, and author of Ext JS in Action. Anthony De Moss is a professional web and mobile developer. Mitchell Simoens is a Sencha developer supporting the Sencha Touch and Ext JS products. Table of Contents

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 2012

Reviews

[Drew Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Sencha Touch framework such that the reader is empowered to build their own data-driven cross-plaform applications upon completion of the text.

The book presents material first about the various mobile application components that are provided by the framework, and effectively contrasts their default behaviors and flexibility to customization. Then, the author covers the process necessary to package these components into a functioning application.

While I didn't use version 1.x of the framework, I appreciate when the author notes framework changes that might affect applications developed in the previous version.

The time the authors takes to delve into the object model through class hierarchy diagrams and component life cycles is incredible valuable as a foundation for exploring and extending the Sencha Touch framework.

The code samples provided in the book break up the prose with useful examples that clearly demonstrate the concepts presented in each section. The authors use these example to teach the framework piece-by-piece so that the reader is able to construct their own working components earlier in the book, and with the comprehensive third part of the applications by modifying the samples.

The only point of constructive feedback I have is: early on in the book, there are certain assumptions that the writers take about the readers knowledge of either Sencha or Ext.JS. Since I arrived at the introduction of this book cold on the ExtJS framework, I found myself to be marginally confused about certain calls and framework model attributes.

But, this does not persist through the book, and in the end I found this book to be a great hands-on introduction to the capabilities of the framework.

[Luigi Fugaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, it has been long time since I read such a good book.
Detailed contents and excellent editing.

It's not a secret that if you are familiar with Ext JS you are half-away.
In fact, Seancha Touch is based on the Ext JS v4 as its core, but with a lot of improvements regarding performance.
One more thing to keep in mind: mobile-development is not the same as web-development. As a matter of fact the book itself suggests you the Ext JS in Action (Manning, 2010) book for web-development (same author).

Let's talk about the book.

Since the first chapters, you get the real feeling of how a mobile-sencha-touch-application looks like. It's just like native ones.
You will start dealing with the framework and the various ComponentManagers, which is something you need to understand well in order to work properly with ST.
After that, the book drives you to the UI world with layouts and UI-widgets. Here the book gives its best in my opinion - ST has a lot of widgets.
You will see a lot of example, codes and images in the book that describe in deep detail how widget works and how you stick them to your component manager.

After the all built-in UI-widgets you start dealing with data management and all comes with: data stores, models, proxies, List and NestedList.
You will learn how to write JavaScript code using the Sencha Touch classes.
As most of the books out there, there are also chapters about HTML5 media tags, GMaps and GeoLocalization.

In conclusion, if you need to develop mobile application and you do not want to handle (at least two) native codes, Sencha Touch and this book is all you need.

Highly recommended!!!

[Davi Bauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good introduction on Sencha Touch. The author explores a good range of things, from coding the main widgets to packaging the code to production. I put in practice the examples shown in the book with little trouble.