Ignite UI is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Ignite UI is now open source

infragistics.com

99 pointsmichaelmior46 comments

Some examples: http://www.igniteui.com/application-samples

Some points:

Project Management Dashboard takes about 30 seconds to load (on a loading bar), [s]and has right click disabled[/s] It appears my computer must have been lagging badly, because RC does indeed work.

Marketing dashboard transfers 6MB of assets, and took 14 seconds to load. Not sure what the intended effect was here, but some of the text is messed up too: http://imgur.com/SOz0vkg

Not sure about your internet connection, but it took about 4 seconds on my iPhone..

Just checked on fast.com - 80Mb/s

I've just checked the Project Management one again. Can't right click again (not sure if because of heavy JS, or its restricted), took 13.7 seconds to load (hard refresh), 6.0 MB of content, 5.3MB of that is one JS file, which took over 9 seconds.

25s. On a reasonably fast university network. I don't think it has to do with the connection on our side or the quality of the software itself, that looks more like a throttling server on their end. Though that the browser gets stuck makes me believe that maybe the JS loading things there is doing very strange things causing the waiting time.

200 Mbit/s here, according to Chrome it took ~13 seconds to load the project dashboard.

But worse than that, imho, is how slow the UI/data fetching is once the app is running.

Wow that Project Management example is awful. Took about 10 seconds to load for me, then when I switched between people it totally froze Firefox for a few seconds.

It's definitely enterprise.

Don't get on their mailing list either. They will spam you relentlessly with long buzzword-laden emails a couple of times a week hawking some new "component" or other.

It's not really "enterprise" without calendar and gantt controls.

The tree grid looks pretty rough, but I'm impressed they attempted it at all. Front end frameworks always seem to dead end on that one.

The examples look really nice, and i dont mind the loading time, but the interface feels really sluggish, with delays around 150 - 250 ms - no fun to use. It also uses a full cpu core for a while on any interaction.

This is on some 5 year old amd phenom with firefox, you probably need a fast intel with some other browser for this kind of fullscreen javascript recursive os magic.

Graphically, this could more usable as a standalone opengl or render agnostic ui lib in c or cpp, so you can run these graphs on any labtop.

To save you a click, it's an "enterprise" web front-end framework. The enterprise part must be important because the word appears twice in just the first paragraph:

"For a while now, Ignite UI has been the choice for large enterprises to create beautiful and powerful modern web UIs on top of their enterprise data."

If you're an expensive consultant, could be a nice tool to create some enterprisey lock-in, I guess.

> If you're an expensive consultant

If you're an expensive enterprise consultant

Seriously, I wonder if putting "enterprise" before random words makes any difference on anyone's buying decisions.

I still run into the odd person who wants to deploy Solaris instead of Linux because "it's more enterprise". Yes, that's exactly how they say it.

Weird. I'm heavily allergic to "enterprise" because of spending time in the Microsoft ecosystem, and want to deploy to Illumos because it's better.

Notice he said Solaris and not Illumos. You can still buy Solaris from Oracle if you give them your soul.

As is true for many sysadmins, I run into a slight snag there.

Ha. I work for a company which has the word "Enterprise" in it. And fittingly, the full company name exceeds 50 characters which is helpful when filling out government forms.

I'm sure it does. The more times someone mentions "enterprise" the less likely I am to buy whatever they're selling.

If you want to go all in on the enterprise UI for the web, you go for SAP UI5 (https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com). I mean even the URL looks enterprisy.

The OSS (Apache 2.0 license) version has a simpler URL: http://openui5.org/

Of course, most links just send you to

https://openui5.hana.ondemand.com/

Complete with enterprise level Star Wars scrolls:

https://openui5.hana.ondemand.com/explored.html

It does if you're serious about it, but in cases like this the usage seems aspirational at best.

Ignite UI is a UI framework like Kendo, JQuery UI, etc. They opensourced only small part of components - mostly combobox and plenty of editors. There are already tens of similar components. More complex components like grid, charts are still closed source and paid.

I've used the Ignite UI grid at work, and it is one of the better ones for large data sets.

Infragistics is a bespoke software dev shop that does mostly Microsofty line of business web stuff. SharePoint, ASP.Net, Silverlight, SSRS/SSIS, etc.

I think they sell to big companies who are Microsoft vendor-locked (probably also Microsoft itself).

Ignite UI is a component library, like Telerik UI.

Very similar to Telerik.

This is Freemium advertisement

Seems to be.

IgniteUI ($1495 per developer)

I also know:

Webix ($469 per developer)

dhtmlx ($466 per project)

ExtJS ($895 per 5 developers)

Kendo UI ($999 per developer)

Anyone knows other alternatives?

http://cx.codaxy.com/

Looks really nice and based on React.

I'm really interested to know, who are the customers for such a product?

Well, people who want more sophisticated UI elements than HTML gives them, but don't wanna implement them themselves?

ExtJS is $895 per developer with a minimum order of 5 licenses.

ah, okay.

They got rather strange pricing lately.

Back in the 4.0 days it was like ~$400 for one dev, without support.

Is this Fremium or crippleware? I'm getting tired of business raising the open source flag for only sharing a small part of their code and then writing:

"Big news for the web dev community! Ignite UI is now open source! "

I'm sorry but this is not big news and it's not really open source.

Hello Guys, My name is Dean Guida, I am the founder & CEO of Infragistics. The samples you are commenting about below are designed to show LOB apps that would run on an iPad or Desktop for internal use. Thank you for the feedback and we will continue to work on making our UI components smaller and faster. Also we will be release more components to Open source from here on in. The cost of the full Ignite UI commercial version is $695. We build software for developers on Mobile, Cloud, Web and desktop. Not just Microsoft. We did start writing developer tools for Microsoft platforms.

All the best, Dean Guida (deang@infragistics.com)

From [1]: "Ignite UI is an advanced HTML5+ toolset that helps you create stunning, modern Web apps. Building on jQuery and jQuery UI, it primarily consists of feature rich, high-performing UI controls/widgets such as all kinds of charts, data visualization maps, (hierarchical, editable) data grids, pivot grids, enhanced editors (combo box, masked editors, HTML editor, date picker, to name a few), flexible data source connectors, and a whole lot more."

1: https://github.com/IgniteUI/igniteui-react

Although they didn't include any of the data visualization or grid-management components in the open-source version, which makes it a less-performant, more-antiquated and less-functional version of, well, any other similar UI toolkit out there. File under "desperate attempt to stay relevant."

What is this? An framework similar to bootstrap or semantic-UI?

More similar to ExtJS I think. But with bindings to Angluar, React etc.

Summary: We ran out of ideas to enrich our enterprise product and growth isn't what we'd like, so come develop features for us and fix our bugs while advertising to your friends. Another bloated, community-leeching, outdated, and unnecessary evolutionary dead end hoping to be put on life support by newbies attracted to sparkly frameworks, preferably social media addicts who post about every new thing they see. No?

Karma be damned, that's how it reads to me.

I tried one of their few demos, and all the interaction is incredibly laggy. Arguably pretty, but not something I would ever use for work (FF50 on i7!).

I took a look cause I'm interested in updating our analytics dashboards and there was some performance issues as others have noted.

Also I know its petty but the fact these guys don't have SSL certs for their website(s) bothers me.

Does anyone have a good recommendation for analytic/dashboard like components (doesn't have to be OSS but that would be nice)? I know Highcharts is popular.

I think it's too heavy for mobile phones. The demos don't load.

https://imgur.com/a/oOxpt

Perhaps someone will make their controls mobile-friendly now.

I don't know who would want to use this by choice.

Is this based on WebComponents?

I saw OnsenUI and liked it very much, but it isn't as powerfull as IgniteUI and only mobile.

"Wow! Another UI framework for the web," said no one, ever.

Probably something I won't use, but I see the benefit of unified UI frameworks as opposed to integrating several Javascript packages, each with their own syntaxes and semantics (initialization functions vs objects, callbacks vs promises, etc). Moreover, I don't think this is new, just open sourced.

That website doesn't load, but I guess it's about this toolkit: http://www.igniteui.com/

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