Show HN: Recently started working on an open source data grid editor in JS/HTML | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Recently started working on an open source data grid editor in JS/HTML

github.com

46 pointslauriswtf21 comments

There are quite a few open source grids out there already. What features are you planning and how are you going to set this apart from the other grids. For instance, my favorite grid is dgrid [1]. Go to their main site and go to the features [2] (scrolling down just a bit there will give you a comparison table to other grids) and let us know if you plan on implementing any of those (especially i18n) or if you're going to have any differentiating features.

[1] -- https://github.com/sitepen/dgrid

[2] -- http://dojofoundation.org/packages/dgrid/#features

While dojo once held a special place in my heart, it's not what it used to be and I think a lot of people have now moved away from it. I think the dojo dependency will be seen as a drawback by many.

Personally I spent ages waiting for WaveMaker to move to 1.7 and start using dgrid. Before I gave up on WaveMaker and dojo toolkit in favour of other technologies.

What do you use instead of dojo now?

We took a strategic decision to go strictly ExtJS, but so far I can only say we use mostly ExtJS. I really like it. Most of our clients are big enterprise and all the stuff we do is very data heavy (analytics etc.), so we're happy to pay the licence fees just to see them stick around and support it for a few more years.

The README.md file and linked blog posts have more info on the topic (e.g., goals and roadmap of the project). Sensei Grid will always be simple and there won't any fancy or extra features than the bare essentials for a data grid. Additional functionality will be provided through plugins or implemented by users.

After first glance it seems that Dgrid requires dojo framework which I have no interest to depend on and also provides too much functionality for us. Datazenit needs something simple, stable and extensible. Sensei Grid will definitely have just a tiny fraction of Dgrid features. If you need something fully featured and complex, then Sensei Grid is not for you and you should stick with Dgrid or any other alternative.

>>Sensei Grid will always be simple and there won't any fancy or extra features than the bare essentials for a data grid.

Nice. I wish more developers took this approach. I've lost count of how many times I needed some specific functionality (that was advanced/complex enough to make me not want to write it on my own) and ended up using a gigantic library that came with a gazillion other features that I never used.

I'm a little surprised at the comments asking if another grid is needed since "theres other open source projects out there like the one I use at work (insert crappy grid here)".

There really aren't a whole lot of open source grids that compete with some of the commercial solutions like extJS or kendoUI. These suck because you can't use the data grid in piecemeal fashion, you have to adopt an entire widget library.

I've yet to see one that:

- Is lightweight and standalone. - Is easy to modify the look and feel - Has good performance with tons of rows - Has a super easy api - Integrates easily with client side mvc frameworks.

From a dev's point of view, as someone who has been exhaustively searching for the perfect JS data grid editor for a few years now:

What prompted you to write your own, rather than going with something like (the excellent and liberally licensed) Handsontable?

Actually I am still using Handsontable (while Sensei Grid is under development) and have been using it for quite some time. Handsontable is not stable enough and has too many bugs, at least for our particular use cases. Handsontable is also resource heavy and quite complex - we rather prefer something simple and straightforward that is not a pain to maintain.

There are currently 571 open issues[0] for Handsontable on Github. Each new release breaks something major and we can't wait forever for them to fix the issues. I wrote two blog posts regarding this (without mentioning Handsontable, but it was the library in question):

* http://lauris.github.io/development/2014/08/25/work-and-open...

* http://lauris.github.io/datazenit/2014/08/29/open-source-wor...

These articles may shed some light on why did we start development on our own library.

[0] Handsontable open issues on Github - https://github.com/handsontable/jquery-handsontable/issues

Yeah... having had to implement a couple of workarounds, I can't say I disagree with you. Which is a shame because I think it's a library with great potential and awesome features, but right now needs fixing and polishing rather than new features.

Any plans for developing Sensei Grid past what your use case requires? I hear all the cool kids get to paste cell ranges into their grid plugins :)

I feel the same way, because I really liked Handsontable.

Sensei Grid will be kept simple, but additional functionality will be provided through plugins. I don't want to flood the core grid with functionality that would lead to complexity. However smart pasting is something I would consider including in the core.

Btw I just updated README.me file and added goals, blog posts and other info related to Sensei Grid - https://github.com/datazenit/sensei-grid/blob/master/README....

Excellent. Good luck - I'll be keeping an eye on it.

I know that warpech and his team (the author of handsontable) offer commercial support for handsontable. Have you tried reaching out to them and asking to get specific bugs fixed? I'm only suggesting it because you mentioned gittip as a way to push open source dev. forward on your blog entry.

From a user perspective. providing the bower or component support will be better, and maybe you should place the dependency(jquery) in bower.json or component.json. but not directly in git folder.

Or we could all just use NPM

Haven't looked at the code throughly, but from a quick glance looks like a grid I'd considering using in a personal project vs. the all the other crappy grids out there.

Slightly off topic but, does anyone know of a data grid that supports an expandable tree in the left most column but the right side is a normal grid?

SlickGrid may offer similar functionality - http://mleibman.github.io/SlickGrid/examples/example5-collap...

dgrid does I believe:

https://github.com/sitepen/dgrid

EDIT: Found the tree demo: http://dojofoundation.org/packages/dgrid/js/dgrid/test/tree....

There are more demos here:

http://dojofoundation.org/packages/dgrid/js/dgrid/test/

Sencha has a TreeGrid

http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/tree/buffer-rendere...

Slickgrid does http://mleibman.github.io/SlickGrid/examples/example5-collap...

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