Sencha Touch 2 Up and Running

Chapter 9. Sencha Architect

During the past few chapters, we have crafted the user interface of our applications, using the common items and xtype properties in both parent and child views. In this chapter we are going to learn about Sencha Architect, a full fledged user interface designer and IDE designed to simplify the creation of complex projects based on Sencha Touch or Ext JS.

Introduction

Sencha Architect is a cross-platform desktop application, running on Windows, Linux, and OS X, that allows developers and designers to quickly draft, prototype, and create user interfaces based on both Ext JS and Sencha Touch. It can be downloaded from the Sencha Architect home page as shown in Figure 9-1.

Note

At the time of this writing, the latest available version of Sencha Architect is 2.1.0 (build 676).

iOS and .NET developers will immediately feel at home using Sencha Architect, because this tool provides a similar experience to that of Interface Builder (now integrated into Xcode) or the classic Visual Studio designer experience.

Figure 9-1. Sencha Architect download page

But Sencha Architect allows developers to do much more than just craft an elegant UI in a few mouse clicks; Sencha Architect actually supports the whole MVC architecture of Sencha Touch and Ext JS, and it allows you to visually define and customize the following types of objects:

• Models, including relationships, fields, ...