Generating HTML with JavaScript has always been ugly. Hella ugly. It usually involves writing streams of hard-to-maintain code which just concatenates a bunch of strings together and spits them out in an ugly mess.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we could do something pretty like this:

div(
  h1("Some title"),
  p("Some exciting paragraph text"),
  br(),

  ul(
    li("First item"),
    li("Second item"),
    li("Third item")
  )
);

And have it output something beautiful like this:

<div>
  <h1>Some title</h1>
  <p>Some exciting paragraph text</p>
  <br />
  <ul>
    <li>First item</li>
    <li>Second item</li>
    <li>Third item</li>
  </ul>
</div>

With Jaml, we can do exactly that. Jaml is a simple library inspired by the excellent Haml library for Ruby. It works by first defining a template using an intuitive set of tag functions, and then rendering it to appear as pretty HTML. Here's an example of how we'd do that with the template above:

ExtJS has several built-in Container classes - classes which can contain one or more other Ext.Components (such as Grids, Forms, other Panels, etc). The most obvious example of a Container is the Ext.Panel class, along with its subclasses such as Ext.TabPanel, Ext.form.FormPanel and Ext.Window. With each container class you can add a bunch of components, like this:

//a child component to be added to the container below
var myComponent = new Ext.Panel({html: 'component 1'});

//Ext.Panel is a subclass of Ext.Container
var myPanel = new Ext.Panel({
  items: [
    myComponent,
    {html: 'component 2'},
    {html: 'component 3'}
  ]
});

Which will just create a Panel with three other Panels as its child components ('panel' is the default xtype, so we don't have to specify it). More to the point, you can add and remove components from the Container like this: