

Show HN: Recently started working on an open source data grid editor in JS/HTML - lauriswtf
https://github.com/datazenit/sensei-grid/tree/master

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craigching
There are quite a few open source grids out there already. What features are
you planning and how are you going to set this apart from the other grids. For
instance, my favorite grid is dgrid [1]. Go to their main site and go to the
features [2] (scrolling down just a bit there will give you a comparison table
to other grids) and let us know if you plan on implementing any of those
(especially i18n) or if you're going to have any differentiating features.

[1] -- [https://github.com/sitepen/dgrid](https://github.com/sitepen/dgrid)

[2] --
[http://dojofoundation.org/packages/dgrid/#features](http://dojofoundation.org/packages/dgrid/#features)

~~~
boomskats
While dojo once held a special place in my heart, it's not what it used to be
and I think a lot of people have now moved away from it. I think the dojo
dependency will be seen as a drawback by many.

Personally I spent ages waiting for WaveMaker to move to 1.7 and start using
dgrid. Before I gave up on WaveMaker and dojo toolkit in favour of other
technologies.

~~~
mynegation
What do you use instead of dojo now?

~~~
boomskats
We took a strategic decision to go strictly ExtJS, but so far I can only say
we use _mostly_ ExtJS. I really like it. Most of our clients are big
enterprise and all the stuff we do is very data heavy (analytics etc.), so
we're happy to pay the licence fees just to see them stick around and support
it for a few more years.

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mrpickles
I'm a little surprised at the comments asking if another grid is needed since
"theres other open source projects out there like the one I use at work
(insert crappy grid here)".

There really aren't a whole lot of open source grids that compete with some of
the commercial solutions like extJS or kendoUI. These suck because you can't
use the data grid in piecemeal fashion, you have to adopt an entire widget
library.

I've yet to see one that:

\- Is lightweight and standalone. \- Is easy to modify the look and feel \-
Has good performance with tons of rows \- Has a super easy api \- Integrates
easily with client side mvc frameworks.

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boomskats
From a dev's point of view, as someone who has been exhaustively searching for
the perfect JS data grid editor for a few years now:

What prompted you to write your own, rather than going with something like
(the excellent and liberally licensed) Handsontable?

~~~
lauriswtf
Actually I am still using Handsontable (while Sensei Grid is under
development) and have been using it for quite some time. Handsontable is not
stable enough and has too many bugs, at least for our particular use cases.
Handsontable is also resource heavy and quite complex - we rather prefer
something simple and straightforward that is not a pain to maintain.

There are currently 571 open issues[0] for Handsontable on Github. Each new
release breaks something major and we can't wait forever for them to fix the
issues. I wrote two blog posts regarding this (without mentioning
Handsontable, but it was the library in question):

* [http://lauris.github.io/development/2014/08/25/work-and-open...](http://lauris.github.io/development/2014/08/25/work-and-open-source/)

* [http://lauris.github.io/datazenit/2014/08/29/open-source-wor...](http://lauris.github.io/datazenit/2014/08/29/open-source-work-2-sensei-grid/)

These articles may shed some light on why did we start development on our own
library.

[0] Handsontable open issues on Github -
[https://github.com/handsontable/jquery-
handsontable/issues](https://github.com/handsontable/jquery-
handsontable/issues)

~~~
boomskats
Yeah... having had to implement a couple of workarounds, I can't say I
disagree with you. Which is a shame because I think it's a library with great
potential and awesome features, but right now needs fixing and polishing
rather than new features.

Any plans for developing Sensei Grid past what your use case requires? I hear
all the cool kids get to paste cell ranges into their grid plugins :)

~~~
lauriswtf
I feel the same way, because I really liked Handsontable.

Sensei Grid will be kept simple, but additional functionality will be provided
through plugins. I don't want to flood the core grid with functionality that
would lead to complexity. However smart pasting is something I would consider
including in the core.

Btw I just updated README.me file and added goals, blog posts and other info
related to Sensei Grid - [https://github.com/datazenit/sensei-
grid/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/datazenit/sensei-
grid/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
boomskats
Excellent. Good luck - I'll be keeping an eye on it.

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leeluolee
From a user perspective. providing the bower or component support will be
better, and maybe you should place the dependency(jquery) in bower.json or
component.json. but not directly in git folder.

~~~
sehr
Or we could all just use NPM

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Oculus
Haven't looked at the code throughly, but from a quick glance looks like a
grid I'd considering using in a personal project vs. the all the other crappy
grids out there.

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pmorici
Slightly off topic but, does anyone know of a data grid that supports an
expandable tree in the left most column but the right side is a normal grid?

~~~
inoop
Sencha has a TreeGrid

[http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/tree/buffer-
rendere...](http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/tree/buffer-rendered-
treegrid.html)

