I'm not the parent, but we switched from Datatables to SlickGrid: https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid

Much nicer API and it's fast for large amounts of data. Unfortunately like many things it's lacking a lot of docs so you have to dig through the source of the examples.

We finally ended up picking http://dgrid.io/ over SlickGrid and jqGrid. As with every table component, there are some quirks, but we're really happy with it. Feels like the most modern table component to us.