If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
My app is a bunch of CRUD.
In a typical web app, you have a standard set of screens for create, edit, etc.
But my live chat / CRM app is essentially a thick client that runs inside of a web browser. It pulls everything from the back end using XHR.
So I was facing the problem of displaying the data vs. editing the data. Initially I’d planned doing a preview pane like the one below. If you wanted to edit the record, you’d open a dialog.
But this was just grating on me. It meant that:
- I’d have the same data in 2 places.
- There’d be an extra step involved in editing
- Switching contexts between the main screen and dialog would be mildly disorienting.
- I’d have to do more work. Make sure 2 panels were refreshed, etc.
Of course I knew that the simplest thing to do was to just display the data in a form. But that was out of the question.
This morning I sat down for my weekly technical review, and asked myself “why?”
The only reason I could think of was that….html forms are ugly.
But here’s the funny part. The styled forms in ext-js look great! I was discounting them based on my impression of forms from 1998. Pretty dumb, huh?
 Nothing wrong with that! 
Technorati Tags: live chat, click to call, live sales, proactive sales, triggers, qualified leads, ext-js
