From: Dr. Syd Nicholson
Hi Nathan,
I use extjs (www.extjs.com)
Yes. I was looking at their site yesterday, in addition to Microsoft's site. They have some great demos that cover the basics. The tabs look like tabs. There's a nice visual transitional effect when the mouse moves over or clicks them. The content associated with the tab snaps up when clicked, or is filled in at run-time without requiring a complete page refresh, and can retain it's state when other tabs are activated. The advanced version enables tabs to be deleted by a user click at run-time, and are in a container that pans left and right when the number of tabs exceed available space.
Let me mention a few additional requirements I've run into, which I didn't see at their site. A tab container where tabs fill in any space available to them (according to the size of the window, for example), but wrap to the next line down, so that all tabs are visible, all the time. In some cases panning left and right is not good enough.
One application that comes to mind, and developed by one of my colleagues, queries and maintains student records, and has grown to 26 tabs in the main window, because there are a lot of child and grandchild tables related to Students. Schedules, Attendance, Grades, Transcripts, Medical Records, Academic Plans, Disciplinary Actions, etc.
Another requirement is for child-tabs within tab content, as you drill down from top-level data to child data, grandchild data, and great grandchild data, for example.
Another requirement is to enable tabs to receive keyboard focus, in addition to mouse events. Accelerator keystrokes to activate a tab would be nice.
Nathan.
midrange.com
