WEBIX BLOG

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:

With the help of Webix you can create a web app which will work equally well on both desktop and mobile devices. However, it still remains only an HTML page. In order to create a native app, you need some other tools.

PhoneGap is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardized web APIs for the platforms you care about. Phohegap works on base of HTML5 and can be used to create native app for all major mobile systems – iOS, Android, Windows Phone and others.

In this tutorial we will describe the process of creating a simple native app by means of Webix and PhoneGap tools.
You can get the final code of the application from github.

NodeJS is one of the hottest programming technologies. It allows creating fully functional web apps in a few lines of code. What is more, apps on NodeJS platform can be made completely in JavaScript. Using the same language on client and server side gives us real bonuses.

Let’s see how the client-side code based on Webix UI can be connected to a database with the help of NodeJS.

JavaScript UI library Webix allows redefining the appearance of many elements through templating. For example, in tree view we can define the look of item through the following template:

Here you can see the two main components of webix templates: common helpers and property placeholders. Common helpers are predefined pieces of logic which renders some common elements (tree icon in the above case). Property placeholders are markers that will be replaced with data from related data object.
By using html tags in the template we can change the look of component in many ways.

If you want to add JavaScript charts with main Pivot Table functions to your web app, you can use Webix Pivot Chart. This powerful component shows data series, categories and chart axes the same way a widget JavaScript Charts does and provides you with interactive filtering controls for quick dataset analyzing.

Pivot Chart delivers various types of charts: line and spline chart, area chart, bar chart, pie chart, 3d pie chart, donut chart, scatter chart, and radar chart.

Please note that the article is outdated. There is a new article on the integration of Webix with dhtmlxScheduler.

All the working processes are connected with making plans and their fulfilling. To organize events and appointments or to manage and track the ongoing tasks, managers can use an interactive dhtmlxScheduler.

dhtmlxScheduler is a JavaScript multifunctional event calendar that allows adding a Google-like scheduler into your web app. It can create events, show a schedule for a day, week and month, display locations associated with the calendar events, display recurring events.

Nice news! You can easily use Webix with the above useful planning tool. This integration will empower your web apps with the multiple features of Scheduler leaving all great Webix functions.

Moreover, you don’t need to write tons of code to add Scheduler into a Webix app. You can use Scheduler as any other Webix component.

One of the latest cool APIs of the modern web is web sockets API. It allows creating real-time apps, where users can collaborate, get notifications and data updates whenever the data is changed. This article will show how you can create a simple web chat by using Webix and web sockets API.

Web chat is a “hello world” for real-time web apps. You can grab the final code from github.

Are you looking for an easy-to-use tool for fast prototyping? Would you like to share your UI experiments in popular social nets?

Webix presents a live coding tool “Code Snippet” that allows you to code UI with Webix and see the results of your work immediately.

This tool enables you to code in JavaScript and HTML, load data in JSON and XML formats or apply 6 Webix skins to decorate your UI.

It’s common knowledge that chart is a convenient tool for arranging and manipulating information. Charts can present large amounts of data in a simple schematic way. Keeping up with the times, Webix Library offers a possibility to integrate with popular charts of such Javascript libraries as D3, Raphael, Sigma and JustGage. At the same time, Webix has a collection of its own charts.

Building Chart View

You don’t need to write a lot of code in order to add third-party charts into a Webix application since it’s done with the help of dedicated Webix components.

However, these components aren’t included into the default lib package, so you have to download a JS file for the needed component from Webix open repository of helpers.

This special javascript file will connect your app to the necessary chart and autoload all the corresponding chart files.

There’s no doubt that a possibility to place an online text editor on the web page is a necessary and useful thing. Webix library offers a simple solution for such a task with just a bit of coding required.

For now, Webix provides support for such popular editors as Mercury, NicEdit, Tinymce, CodeMirror and CKEditor.