Now up on RIAForge is the first Release Candidate of ColdExt. ColdExt is a ColdFusion tag library which makes it easier to build rich user interfaces using the amazing Ext JS library. ColdExt supports multiple CFML engines including CFMX 7, CF8, Railo 3.0.1 and OpenBD 1.0.

This release provides support for ExtJS 2.2.1 plus 6 new demos and 2 new user extensions - fileUploadField and gridSearch.

The main enhancement in RC 1 is to allow the JS and CSS resources for User Extensions to be loaded up front on the calling page, meaning that UX components can now be used in remote pages loaded via Ajax. This can be configured on the onReady tag using the uxLoad attribute, by specifying a comma delimited list of the extensions to load (based on the folder name of the extension in the /ext/ux folder) or by specifying "all" to load the resources for all extensions. For e.g.

<ext:onReady loadingMask="true" uxLoad="all">

Check out the latest demos for a bit more of a taste of ColdExt, and be sure to view the source of each demo to see how easy ColdExt is to implement.

In other news, Kevin Roche wrote a nice series of blog posts on ColdExt back in December documenting some of the issues he faced in implementing some components. ColdExt also got a mention in Episode 2 of the CF Hour podcast by Dave Ferguson and and Michael Sean Becker â€" cheers guys :)

Also be sure to mark your calendars for April 14-16 2009 as the first ever Ext Conference will see the release of Ext JS 3.0! Expect a ColdExt release to follow during April.

If you have any feedback or feature requests for ColdExt please get in touch by leaving a comment here, using the contact form on the ColdExt project page or emailing me directly (my email address is in the readme.txt file in the downloadable zip!)