Sometimes you just have to get over yourself

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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!

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