The Module Pattern is a way of using a closure in JavaScript to create private variables and functions. Here's a brief recap:

var myObject = (function() {
  //these are only accessible internally
  var privateVar = 'this is private';
  var privateFunction = function() {
    return "this is also private";
  };
  
  return {
    //these can be accessed externally
    publicVar: 'this is public',
    
    publicFunction: function() {
      return "this is also public"
    },

    //this is a 'privileged' function - it can access the internal private vars
    myFunction: function() {
      return privateVar;
    }
  };
})();

myObject.privateVar; //returns null as private var is private
myObject.myFunction(); //return the private var as myFunction has access to private properties

Breaking this down, we create a function which is executed immediately (via the brackets at the end) and returns an object which gets assigned to myObject.

Because this object contains references to our private variable (privateVar is referenced inside myFunction), the JavaScript engine keeps privateVar available in memory which means myFunction can still access it using what is called a closure. This pattern as a whole is usually called the Module Pattern.

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'}

You can of course define any url matching scheme using the connect() function. I then use a simple Dispatcher, which looks at the decoded parameters. It finds the appropriate controller and calls that action on the controller, passing any other parameters as arguments. For example: