Preparing the development environment

The application that we are going to develop has a very simple architecture. We are going to use Ext JS 5 on the frontend, which is going to communicate with a server-side module using Ajax/JSON, which will then communicate with a database.

The following diagram encapsulates the preceding paragraph:

The server-side module will be developed using PHP. You need not worry if you don't know PHP. We are going to use very basic code (no frameworks), and we are going to focus on the programming logic that needs to be implemented on the server side. This way, you can apply the same logic using any other programming language, such as Java, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, or any other (that supports the exchange of data in JSON or XML format as this is the communication format used by Ext JS). For the database, we will use MySQL. We will also use the Sakila sample schema (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/sakila/en/), a free MySQL sample database, which is perfect to demonstrate how to work with Create, Read, Update, and Delete/Destroy (CRUD) operations on a database table and also use more complex operations, such as views and stored procedures (we will learn how to handle all this information with Ext JS).

Also, we will need to have Sencha Cmd installed (we have already installed Sencha Cmd during Chapter 1, Sencha Ext JS Overview). However, we still need to execute some extra steps to have it configured. Once configured, we will be able to create the application structure, customize the theme, and also make the production build. Sencha Cmd requires having Ruby compatible with versions 1.8 or 1.9 (version 2.x will not work). We also need to have Apache Ant installed (and because Apache Ant is built with Java, we also need to have Java installed and configured in our computer).

After we have finished implementing the application, we will customize the theme, and because of this, we will need to install Ruby (1.8 or 1.9) and the Sass and Compass gems.

To deploy the application, we need a web server. If you do not have any web server installed on your computer yet, do not worry. In this book, we will use Xampp as the default web server.

We will also need a browser to run our application in. The recommended ones are Firefox (with Firebug) or Google Chrome.

If you do not have any of the software or technologies mentioned previously installed on your computer, don't worry. To summarize all the tools and software we need to have installed prior to starting the fun, here is a list with the links where you can download them and find installation instructions (all items are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS):

Of course, we also need Ext JS SDK and Sencha Cmd, which we downloaded and installed in Chapter 1, Sencha Ext JS Overview.