Chapter 5. A Place for Your Stuff: Code Cabinet Ext

In this chapter, we'll fulfill the need of our obsessive-compulsive personalities and develop an application to store our code snippets in.

As good developers, we quickly learn that "stealing" is better than creating. That is, the more you can find code that does what you need rather than writing it yourself, the better. This doesn't always mean stealing from others (and stealing is just an attempt at humor; it's not actually stealing, of course!). Especially after you do this programming thing for a while, you begin to steal from yourself more and more because you remember that you wrote that function to encrypt passwords a couple of projects ago, or you remember that algorithm you put together for processing account numbers, or whatever else.

Being able to find those snippets of code is a challenge, but it's a challenge we're here to meet! With the help of Ext JS and Gears, we'll create an application that lets us store our snippets, organize them, and even search for them. That's what this chapter is all about. In the process, you'll get some good experience with some new pieces of Ext JS that I think you'll find very interesting indeed!

Let's begin by looking at what we want to accomplish and what we want this application to be able to do.