Juan Carlos Galindo Navarro of Venezuela-based RIATeam shares his early dgrid experience with SitePen. Here’s what he had to say.
SitePen: How did you learn about dgrid?
RIATeam: As a lover of the progress that Dojo Toolkit provides the community, I am always on the lookout for news and features shown in the SitePen Blog. With a good cup of coffee and prepared to read a good article about Dojo 1.8, I was pleasantly surprised with this new widget called “dgrid”. And I was very surprised because it is designed from a different perspective. Dazzled by this great news I turned quickly to their official dgrid site to know more of this powerful widget.
SitePen: Why did you choose dgrid?
RIATeam: Web application developers have an eternal battle against the excessive weight of our applications, and must always be in tune with the performance of them, especially when we want to decide what features to use. Using dgrid as a widget to display data is one of the best decisions I have taken. It is lightweight, powerful, fast and stable. And not only that, it is ready for mobile applications.
SitePen: What factors went into your decision?
RIATeam: First of all, is was very easy and quick to implement. The problem we had with other grids was how annoying it can be for simple features such as selecting a row and working with it. With dgrid, it is much easier and for these common tasks, it becomes natural. Additionally, its extensibility gives it more robustness. For a widget that is already strong on its own, this makes it far more powerful when compared to other grids. And finally, it loads rapidly due to its foundation on AMD.
SitePen: Is dgrid being used to replace another grid?
RIATeam: Yes, I tried several: jqGrid, dhtmlxGrid, etc., and we even tried DojoxDataGrid. My words above reflect my joy for dgrid, and none of the other grids we used come close.
SitePen: How does your application use dgrid?
RIATeam: My mission is to create an online application creation WYSIWYG user interface very similar to HTML5 Maqetta, but with a slightly different philosophy. My major concern is the weight of the widgets when creating new interfaces, since each widget represents a number of bytes that might pose a problem with the performance of a given application.
The first thing I did was install it from https://github.com/sitepen/dgrid using cpm install dgrid. It was then very easy to create my first grid:
I then adapted it to my application. With dgrid, I can create multiple instances, quickly, easily and especially lightweight. And I can access each of the properties and events in real-time execution.
In the production design step, even adding 20 dgrid instances has absolutely fantastic performance results:
SitePen: Overall, how is your experience with dgrid?
RIATeam: Magnificent, I think it’s a great widget. I can speak positively about its ability to adapt, it is very light and reliable. The only challenge for an inexperienced programmer is that it’s not 100% clear which parts of dgrid are part of Dojo and what is separate. It should be clarified in greater depth that you need to register with "dgrid/extensions/DijitRegistry" to make dgrid work as a Dijit.
SitePen: What are your future plans for using dgrid?
RIATeam: Evangelize. And create a dynamic dgrid builder. Adopt it as my standard for new development.
SitePen: What’s your favorite thing about dgrid?
RIATeam: The lightweight and powerful plugins. I really feel that Dojo + dgrid is one of the most powerful JavaScript frameworks in the world.
About RIATeam
RIATeam (Rich Internet Apps Team) is a pre-launch startup focused on the market for the simple development of apps. The company seeks to change the paradigms of the Internet and solve the real needs of their customers. They create measures-based tools apps online with a variety of appropriate technologies. Dojo 1.8, jQuery, JSON-REST, Java,. NET, ORACLE, SQLServer and others are just a few technologies used by their platform.
Are you a new or existing user to dgrid?
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