Unleash The Grid

http://blog.jqueryui.com/2011/02/unleash-the-grid/

by sant0sk1 • 15 years ago

40 20 15 years ago

blog.jqueryui.com

Groxx5• 15 years ago

>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 Out-of-date documentation, inconsistent interfaces, and just-plain-incorrect advice are absolutely everywhere.

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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.

Griever2• 15 years ago

While I disagree about your arguments against jQuery UI (I actually quite like it as a whole, and the CSS arragenment doesn't bother me at all), I wholeheartedly agree about jqGrid. What a terribly bloated plugin. I have no idea how it got to earn the 'respected' title it has today.

Groxx5• 15 years ago

I think it's the jQuery UI CSS integration and that it really does do just about everything. You just need to kick it around to get it to do so correctly, and haunt Stack Overflow when documentation fails and the cryptic source code don't help ("rd[ts.p.colModel[j+gi+si+ni].name] = v;" ? WTF?). I have no clue how Oleg does it, I think they may actually be a super-intelligent chatbot that searches against the source code.

As to the rant against UI's consistency, I should point out that I deal with jQuery and in-house code almost completely, no Ext / other frameworks, and I'm not counting one-trick-ponies, though those are typically simple enough to re-write to do what I want. And I write freakishly flexible code any time I run across a re-use case (I'm helping build a utility base for the company I'm working with). jQuery is fantastic, but UI has nowhere near that level of polish.

ajpiano• 15 years ago

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.

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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.

Groxx5• 15 years ago

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.

adovenmuehle• 15 years ago

I'd like to say that Scott Gonzalez and I have been working to unify the API and make it more consistent.

When the 1.9 release is out, we're hoping to have less bugs and more consistent code. I believe the effects plugins are also going to be rewritten (draggable, droppable, etc) which should improve consistency and behavior of all the plugins.

moe• 15 years ago

I agree that Jquery UI leaves a lot to be desired and the widget-selection is an outright pity when compared to the competing frameworks.

However in their defense you have to keep in mind that the project is (from what I gather) run entirely by volunteers. It is quite hard to match the inner consistency and widget-count of a YUI or extJS when most of your widgets originally began life as external jquery-plugins from various sources.

Under those premises the level of integration they have achieved so far (themeroller et al) is actually quite respectable.

Personally I hope at some point a company will step in and sponsor them some fulltime devs. A few dedicated developer-months could probably work wonders here.

mgutz• 15 years ago

Agree with you. jQuery UI is not at the same level as jQuery. It hasn't been since day one. If it didn't have the jQuery name I wonder how popular it would be. On a related note, jQuery mobile Alpha 3 just released and its awesome. jQuery mobile team has their shit together. Maybe the mobile team should direct the entire UI platform.

wahnfrieden2• 15 years ago

Take a look at Dojo's Dijit widget system for a nice example of consistent and reusable APIs.

thasmin• 15 years ago

It's funny that they have double platinum sponsors.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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?

Groxx5• 15 years ago

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.

wahnfrieden2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

yycom• 15 years ago

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

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