WEBIX BLOG

TL; DR Grab the final package from https://github.com/webix-hub/webix-firebase

Dynamic Web

Not so long ago web apps were slow and phlegmatic. The whole page had to be reloaded to update information. AJAX has only slightly improved this situation. Now we update separate blocks instead of reloading the whole page. Hardly had we got used to this technique, when a new web transformation appeared on the scene. It is dynamical web, where the content of pages updates by itself.

Now you can find such elements on Facebook or Twitter pages, for example. Data are changed there without our participation. As soon as someone has added a comment or re-tweeted the post, the changes are reflected on the page immediately.

There are several technologies behind dynamical web. WebSockets are the most important of them. You can read how to use them with Webix here. However, web sockets present a very low level of abstraction. Fortunately, it’s possible to get all the benefits of dynamic updates without diving so deeply into the details of data synchronization. There are several great solutions created by web enthusiasts. They allow avoiding difficulties and creating cool dynamic apps.

While providing many UI options, Webix is quite short of animations. It can be easily changed though. Let’s check how to add nice animation effects for different Webix controls.

Carousel, MultiView, TabView

TabView is one of two components that have a built-in support for animation. When you are changing the active tab, a new one is shown with some animation. You can use the animate property to configure the details of animation

Code of demo

Webix UI provides a lot of widgets, but it is just a tiny bit, as compared to the massive amount of different Open Source libraries. Fortunately, it is quite easy to wrap any custom library in Webix UI control.

Konva.js

As an example, I will use Konva javascript library.

During the process of web development it’s highly important to organize the workflow and keep in touch with all members of the team. There are useful tools that allow visualizing all the stages of work and keeping track of each participant’s current workload. One of such tools is a popular Kanban board. It helps to control work processes and maintain steady progress, as you can see what stage of the project should be speeded up and which one is overloaded.

JavaScript Kanban Board is a great widget that can be used for creating powerful apps intended for managing the development process.

In this article we’ll describe the stages of creating a basic Kanban Board with the Webix library. Tasks on the board will be supplemented with tags, images and personal avatars for tasks’ assignees. There will be icons that allow opening a form for editing tasks. Besides, you’ll learn how to customize the styling of the board.

You can check the live demo of the ready Kanban Board.

You probably already know that DataTable has the ability to show checkboxes instead of plain text data. It allows you to provide a simple solution for status marking and data selection.

Basic checkboxes

The minimal code for initializing a DataTable with checkboxes will look as follows:

It will result in a nice-looking JavaScript grid presented in the picture below. The “{common.checkbox()}” line in the template expands in a checkbox control.

Live Demo >>

With the increase in using web applications, the need for a widget that allows working with hierarchical data becomes primary. A web-based file manager is a good solution for managing such type of data within any modern web browser.

Today we are glad to present you a new Webix widget intended for organizing your data in the Internet – JavaScript File Manager. It is a JavaScript and HTML5 component that allows you to manage hierarchical data, e.g. files and folders.

Webix features the drag-and-drop functionality that is available not only for desktop but also for mobile devices.

The library allows making drag-and-drop operations within a widget itself as well as between a few different widgets or even between the same widgets. In this article it goes about drag-and-drop operations within Webix data management widgets.

Learn how to implement this functionality with ease.

Drag-and-drop modes

Firstly, make sure that both target and source widgets have the drag property set to true. Basically, it is enough to enable drag-and-drop.

It is the last part of the tutorial that tells about developing a website by using Webix UI library and Java framework Struts 2. If you haven’t read the previous parts yet check the first and the second parts in the Webix blog.

Nowadays nobody is interested in static data. That’s why our website should be able to download a list of events and reports from database and save all the implemented changes. We will use the most popular database MySQL.

The database structure is simple. It is represented in the image below. We will use two tables for storing events and reports. Each record in the table “speakers” contains the event_id a certain report is related to.

This article is the continuation of the previous blog post that refers to developing a basic website functionality with Webix and Struts 2.

In this part you’ll know how to create the pages “Forthcoming Events” and “Contacts” as well as how to add the information about events and then manage it.

The page with coming events will look this way:

Introduction

Day by day the world is getting faster. News is being spread around the world within minutes while the search for information is reduced just to surfing the Internet. Nowadays developers don’t spend months or years on the implementation of new ideas, this process can take just a couple of days or maybe weeks. At the same time, the process of developing web apps and sites is going up to a new speed level.The tools of building websites are getting smarter and even easier to use.

Code generators, autocomplete, code analyzers, libraries and frameworks have settled down in the developers’ life. They let reduce the time of site development to the minimum. The Internet itself is developing together with these tools.

Not long ago sites have presented static data while their functionality has been rather minimal. Today sites are fully-functional applications which allow performing the actions that earlier have been available on desktop only. One of the tools for fast building of a web app’s interface for both mobile and desktop devices is Webix, a JavaScript UI widgets library.

Let’s consider an example of creating a site aimed for announcing future conferences on front-end development with the help of Webix and a Java-framework Struts 2. It will look as follows: