

Unleash The Grid - sant0sk1
http://blog.jqueryui.com/2011/02/unleash-the-grid/

======
Groxx
> _We believe that having a consistent interface to complex plugins is a big
> win for users._

 _Consistent_? jQuery UI is one of the (not _the_ , just high on the list of)
least consistent and least flexible javascript tools I use daily. I have to
hack around behaviors and inject buttons into areas that aren't blessed to
have them all the time, and it's a royal pain because there are _zero_ tools
to help you and doing anything not explicitly supported (and some that are)
often causes problems further down the rabbit hole. You've got to dive through
div.ui-something > li.ui-another span.ul-cryptic div.ui-some-long-name just to
get to the container, and God help you if you put something slightly too large
in.

I hope they're at least more consistent than jqGrid. I've been using it
heavily lately, and hacking on extra features, and holy _cow_ is that an
inconsistent mess. It's horrendous. It works quite well as long as you follow
the examples, but try to do anything else and have fun! Out-of-date
documentation, inconsistent interfaces, and just-plain-incorrect advice are
absolutely everywhere.

\---

None of this is to say I don't think they can make a good one. I eagerly await
it, and will give it all kinds of hell when it comes out to see what it can
do. I just fear the API.

~~~
ajpiano
All the jQuery UI plugins allow you to fetch cached references to the widget's
proxy elements by grabbing the instance from the jQuery data cache.

var tabs = $("#mytabs").data("tabs"); tabs.lis.append("<button>Add A Button To
All your Tabs</button>");

You can use this to avoid doing crazy DOM traversals to work with and
customise widget components.

\----

That said, we are aware that the perception you share here is not uncommon and
that we need to work to document the shared API of our widgets, and that is
something we are planning to address in the near term.

~~~
Groxx
Didn't know about that one... out of curiosity, where is it documented, and
where would I find out what's in each plugin's data (barring inspecting it
while it's running)? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in the
documentation.

I may have sounded overly critical / angry with my comment, which wasn't
really intended. I fully recognize what a _ridiculously_ hard task making and
maintaining the framework has been, and I use a fair number of them frequently
and recommend it heavily. It saves me a _ton_ of work. I just fear still
having to use a similar-but-updated version of it in a decade; I want
something fundamentally different, which is unlikely to come out of jQuery UI
(legacy support, large codebase, and all that good stuff), and I'm not even
sure what it would look like.

------
Pewpewarrows
DataTables (<http://www.datatables.net/>) and SlickGrid
(<https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid>)

are already amazing and feature-complete. It'll be interesting to see what the
jQueryUI team can come up with now that they've decided not to use either of
these (or any other for that matter). For reference, Grooveshark decided to go
with SlickGrid in their re-write, and from their dev blog posts it sounds like
they love it.

------
csomar
I'm planning to build a jQuery Grid, and have the following points in mind.

\- Consistency: Same or better as ExtJs grid.

\- Flexibility: You can change anything, and I'll provide a documentation
about the code structure so you can hack in.

\- Light-Weight: It'll be very small and just one file. Yes, one JavaScript
file, no CSS or other JavaScript files. (+ jQuery library)

\- Server Side Integration: Easy sever side integration for some language
(like PHP, ASP.net, Ruby...) you just put a line to create a grid from a mySql
table.

Any other points you think it'll make it succeed? Also how much would you pay
for it? (at least give me a range)?

~~~
bck
If you can make it more powerful and still as simple to use as ExtJS grid, I'd
consider paying, but only if the cells could use the same kind of fantastic
templating and CSS options that you can in ExtJS.

------
taitems
I think a really important part of this is that Microsoft is listed as a major
sponsor. This potentially deprecates their .NET datagrids, which our
developers here tend to rely heavily upon.

jQuery tweeted that this functionality will extend existing tables too, so
maybe that is why Microsoft is willing to deprecate their own controls?

~~~
Groxx
If it deprecates their datagrids, it'll be a benefit for the internet as a
whole. Those things are _horrendously_ slow and inefficient, it's part of what
I've been replacing.

------
wahnfrieden
I just want to point out that Dojo has a pretty nice grid widget which
supports fancy stuff like lazy loading while scrolling, so you can have an
enormous data set that's transparently loaded piecemeal without necessitating
a paging UI.

I also see jQuery UI compared to YUI and extJS -- don't forget about Dojo
either!

~~~
quicksilver03
I have always found Dojo to be the slowest JavaScript framework, especially
when coupled with Dijit. Take for example Tiny Tiny RSS, it became almost
unusable after the switch to Dojo and Dijit.

------
thasmin
It's funny that they have double platinum sponsors.

------
yycom
FFS stop calling it a grid. It's a table.

