extjs for application (with embedded http server as well).

Question

Hi,

Is there a framework which allows easy adding of ExtJS to a normal .Net application. This way I only have to create a GUI once, which is then accessible through an embedded webserver. This is great since I then can remote access the server/service/application as well as fiddle with it locally.

My dreamsolution would be: - The framework somehow converts the existing GUI (winforms) to ExtJS, when a local http connection is done. This way I can just use the standard GUI tools to develop the app, and trust that the framework will perform its conversion magic when a http request is done.

A less preferable but also cool solution would be: - The framework exposes ExtJS like classes which I instantiate and define properties on (like the canvas, the buttons, etc) and callbacks(events). Then these classes are used to create the extjs GUI when a connection is made.

The least preferable solution would be: - To have to manually do javascript coding and handle incoming async ajax calls and this way do all the interface stuff.

Does something like this already exist? Or is this something I'll be making for the next X months ;^)

thanks!

R

Answer 1

Your best bet is something like http://www.coolite.com/

Answer 2

http://www.visualwebgui.com/

You might try looking at this framework, it is a bit pricey but it sounds like what you are looking for, minus the EXTJS

Answer 3

You may want to rethink your requirements here. The WinForms model is quite different from the ExtJS model or traditional HTML forms, so converting your application to a web application on the fly will be difficult at best. It is some time since I looked at ExtJS myself, but does it have equivalents of all the standard WebForms controls? And how about user controls and other controls delivered by third parties? And owner-drawn controls?

Instead of spending months on something that may not work properly after all, I would suggest that you look at properly layering your application. If you separate your data layer and expose it as web services of some sort then you can easily make them available for both a win forms application and your ExtJS web application. As long as you keep your business logic as well as your data layer inside the web services the user interface itself should be easy enough to make. Probably easy enough that the automatic generation of the web gui won't be worth spending time on.

Anyway. If you really really want to go this way you could consider using a web service to describe your GUI and build both your WinForms gui and ExtJS gui on the fly. Both technologies support building forms in code so you could download a file that describes the gui and build it the first time the user loads your application. That would require you to write two sets of gui-building code but since it would be based on a format that you control it would probably be easier than to convert a WinForms application to ExtJS directly.

Answer 4

I would recommend you to use http://liveui.net framework. It provides ASP.net based controls which are translated to Extjs controls automatically. I also contains usefull tools for rapid application development and ... it is free.