Using Ext JS in a hosted APEX environment

Oracle APEX is designed to support hosted development, where the only access you have to your workspace is via a browser. The Application Builder and SQL Workshop contain all the necessary functionality to build an application from scratch without any other tools.

Typically in a hosted environment such as http://apex.oracle.com, you don't have access to the web server to upload the Ext JS files. In this situation, you can take advantage of Ext partnering with CacheFly, a global content network, to provide free CDN hosting for the Ext JS framework.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.

For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen; that is, using a CDN to deliver static content, such as Ext JavaScript, CSS, and images will result in your pages getting downloaded significantly faster.

In the hosted environment, you don't load the Ext files onto the server, instead simply reference the Ext content in your Oracle APEX page templates from the CacheFly site. The following code will be added to Oracle APEX page templates:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"  />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-3.3.1/adapter/ext/ext-base.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://extjs.cachefly.net/ext-3.3.1/ext-all.js"></script>

We will look at page templates and how to integrate Ext JS content in greater detail in Chapter 3, Building an Ext Theme into APEX.