I've been making a few updates to the ExtJS API documents application recently. The actual updates include remembering which tabs you have open and using Ext.History to go between tabs (you can follow the forum post or see a beta version).

That's not quite ready yet, but what has been made very clear to me is that any ExtJS application with more than one view should be using Ext.History. With History we get urls inside the application itself, we can parse them and dispatch accordingly. For example, I'm using a Rails-like Router, which lets you define an internal url map like this:

map.connect(":controllers/:action/:id");
map.connect(":controllers/:action");

The router knows how to decode urls based on the regular expression-like syntax above, and parse the matches into an object - for example:

#users/new    <= becomes {controller: 'users', action: 'new'}
#users/edit/2 <= becomes {controller: 'users', action: 'edit', id: 2}
#colours      <= becomes {controller: 'colours'}

Ext.History is a small class that was released with ExtJS 2.2, making it easy to use the browser's back and forward buttons without breaking your AJAX-only pages.

This can be really useful for any ExtJS application with more than one view, for example a simple app with a grid of Products, which can be double-clicked to reveal an edit form. Ext.History allows the user to click the back button to go back to the grid if they're on the form, and even forward again from the grid. It does this by appending a token to the end of the url:

http://myurl.com/ (default url for the app)
http://myurl.com/#products (shows the products grid)
http://myurl.com/#products/edit/1 (shows the edit form for product 1)

This is useful, so let's look at how to set it up. Ext.History requires that a form field and an iframe are present in the document, such as this: