Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly ironic as I've used Telerik components for internal app development in our organization and the amount of cruft that gets loaded is way damn high. The payload is high and round trips are numerous. I ditched all that and developed my own framework from scratch using the open source libraries and managed to reduce the payload and increase responsiveness.

At some point in the past, it made sense to pay Telerik boat loads of money to get libraries that were supposedly plug-and-play but now there are even better solutions available for free thanks to OSS!

Edit:

  Sounds a lot like Flipboard doesn’t it? If you’re a publisher and you opt in, 
  you let Facebook control the distribution of your content, in return for a far 
  more performant experience for your readers, and presumably shared ad revenue 
  of some sorts.

This raised some red flags! Making Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard) the content platform just to reduce cruft and responsiveness appears to be a trojan horse and appears to have similar issues as discussed in the Fb Fraud thread [0]. Another possibility is Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard)would become the Comcasts of tomorrow. The distributed nature of the web is what makes it so invigorating and democratic and I think it would be a mistake to go the cable route.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

Same experience here. Back when I used Telerik they where some of the largest and slowest components I'd ever seen. Even their own homepage was unbearably slow at the time. This was many many years ago.

The company I work for uses Telerik's CMS product, which loads lots of cruft onto your pages and is very slow. I walked away with the same feeling as you did after I read this.

Care to share any great OSS libraries you've found that are good replacements for various Telerik components? Thanks!

Disclaimer: the last time I used Telerik components was in ASP.net 2.0 about 9 years ago.

For React: http://material-ui.com/#/

Bourbon + Refills: http://refills.bourbon.io/

Material Design Lite: http://www.getmdl.io/

Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/

etc, etc. Even back when I used telerik components, it was often faster to develop my own component, tailored to use-case, than it was to figure out how the hell to customize the 15-deep DOM tree that a table component generated.

Thanks for sharing.

I agree. Telerik (and similar) components are great for getting you a lot of functionality straight out of the box, with minimum time and effort.

Where they break down is when you need to make any sort of non-trivial customization or business-specific use case. At that point, it's easier and more maintainable to build things from scratch, or with more loosely coupled base components.

I've looked for a decent widely-compatible DatePicker alternative, and have not been successful. The Kendo DatePicker is a very nice implementation (it works all the way back to IE8) of the one self-contained widget that I'd really prefer not to hand-roll.

As for other Kendo UI components, I've found the ComboBox, DropDownList, NumericTextBox, and MaskedTextBox somewhat useful, in that they set up quickly and look nice. My typical approach is to use Bootstrap for whatever it has built in, and then Kendo UI with the Bootstrap theme for some extra widgets. Watch out though since they use different box models: http://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/using-kendo-with-twitter-bo....

I don't recommend using the Grid for anything but quick-and-dirty development, since any customization is almost inevitably going to be way less enjoyable than maintaining a hand-rolled solution (although the hand-rolled solution will probably take a lot longer to implement at first). The Scheduler is kinda nice but I have the same reservations about it. And don't get me started on the MVVM implementation.

But the good news is that all the basic form input controls (including the DatePicker) are Apache licensed! Until there are more stable and compatible widgets built with React I'll be using them fairly often: https://github.com/telerik/kendo-ui-core

Also, here's the script I use to wrap Kendo widgets in React components: https://github.com/guscost/kendo-react-wrappers

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