Last week we unveiled a the brand new class system coming in Ext JS 4. If you haven’t seen the new system in action I hope you’ll take a look at the blog post on sencha.com and check out the live demo. Today we’re going to dig a little deeper into the class system to see how it actually works.

To briefly recap, the new class system enables us to define classes like this:

Ext.define('Ext.Window', {
    extend: 'Ext.Panel',
    requires: 'Ext.Tool',
    mixins: {
        draggable: 'Ext.util.Draggable'
    },
    
    config: {
        title: "Window Title"
    }
});

Here we’ve set up a slightly simplified version of the Ext.Window class. We’ve set Window up to be a subclass of Panel, declared that it requires the Ext.Tool class and that it mixes in functionality from the Ext.util.Draggable class.

There are a few new things here so we’ll attack them one at a time. The ‘extend’ declaration does what you’d expect - we’re just saying that Window should be a subclass of Panel. The ‘requires’ declaration means that the named classes (just Ext.Tool in this case) have to be present before the Window class can be considered ‘ready’ for use (more on class readiness in a moment).