

Ask HN: Why are decent grid widgets so difficult to find? - gjvc

In this age of web technologies (let us not forget that it has taken this long to reach AngularJS) why is it so difficult to find a decent grid widget when much of the spectrum of day-to-day commercial computing from system monitoring straight through to business functionality requires dynamic table widgets which have decent sorting and filtering capabilities?
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arthurakay
The simple answer is that grids are hard. Everyone loves the simplicity of
tabluar, Excel-like data display - yet it's clearly a difficult task to
achieve in the browser due to the sheer DOM weight of such widgets. Factor in
advanced capabilities like sorting, filtering, customizable display, et al and
HTML/JavaScript performance becomes even harder to manage.

Sencha's Ext JS framework has had perhaps the industry's best grid widget
since 2007. It offers excellent performance, handles infinite data sizes,
built-in sorting and filtering, and is completely customizable. If you poke
through the Sencha API documentation, you'll see a ton of other features.

Try the online example here:
[http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/kitchensink/#grids](http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/kitchensink/#grids)

In full disclosure, I work for Sencha.

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gjvc
from where on sencha.com can one download extjs 4.2 GPL ?

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arthurakay
You can download the Ext JS 5.0.1 GPL at the bottom of this page:
[http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/details](http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/details)

I'm not sure that we still have the links to 4.2 posted anywhere, and in any
case 5.x is definitely the place you'll want to be.

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gjvc
Hello,

Thank you for that link. I was beginning to lose faith.

gjvc

