Different way of programming

For the last week or so, I have been developing a dashboard for an Enterprise Architecture (EA) at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Due to various organizational constraints and confusion regarding where should the EA repository should exist, associated user access issues and which tool should render the dashboard; I am developing the dashboard using ExtJS AJAX framework. Six months ago, I would have spent a few days trying to understand the Application Programming Interface (API) and then slowly build the application scratch. After working with Groovy on Grails and Ruby on Rails, I decided to take the approach of customizing an example, which is provided in the ExtJs framework. This approach has saved me alot of time and I have a better understanding on how ExtJS works. I admit that I don't have a detailed understanding on how ExtJS is designed and how it should work; but I do know enough to say that I can build the User Interface using ExtJS. So if you are getting ready to code in ExtJS then I say to you, "Ext.onReady(..."

So in closing, I would say that it is faster to customize existing code rather building it from scratch. I have been enjoying working with this JavaScript framework.