The Dojo Grid September 16th, 2007 at 9:58 pm by Dylan Schiemann

The single, most asked question with the Dojo 0.9 release has been, “Where’s the grid widget?” We’re finally able to address this request with today’s announcement that SitePen, Mozilla Foundation, Nexaweb Technologies, Redfin, & SnapLogic Announce Open Source Contribution of TurboAjax Group’s High-Performance Grid Widget to Dojo Foundation.

For those of you familiar with the existing TurboGrid widget, you’ll be happy to know that the same great performance and feature set are currently being ported to the 1.0 codebase, with support for Dijit and all of the great features Dijit offers (CSS theming, a11y, il8n, dojo.data, etc.).

We expect the grid to be ready in time for the Dojo 1.0 release, currently slated for mid-to-late October. The feature set and performance of the grid is exceptional and we hope that the JavaScript development community will make significant use of this highly performant, feature-rich, and accessible data grid that will be available under the liberal BSD license. Specifically, the expected feature set includes the following:

  • General Features
    • Browser support matching Dojo 1.0: IE6/7, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3 on Windows, Safari 3 and Firefox 2/3 on Mac, and Firefox 2/3 on Linux. Opera support will follow.
    • Subgrids, nested grids, and tree grids
    • In-place editing
    • Context menus and tooltips specific to a particular row or column
    • Data sorting through sort functions or custom sort filter functions
    • Cell formatters for separation of data from layout
    • Documentation and unit tests
  • Dijit Features
    • Standard Dijit with markup and declarative instantiation
    • Data binding between data columns and grid columns, and dojo.data provider support
    • il8n and a11y
    • Grid events for easy manipulation and event handling for event-driven application development
    • Keyboard support, including cell selection
    • Theme infrastructure with structured CSS in dijit.css and tundra.css
  • Rows, Columns, formatting, and more
    • Virtual scrolling: 100,000+ rows without performance lags
    • User sizable columns
    • Complex rows of various widths and heights, just like HTML tables
    • Cells, rows, and columns may be patterned based on pattern or state
    • Fixed position columns
    • Column dimensions specified in a variety of CSS units, not just pixels
    • dojo.connect calls to selectively show/hide portions of rows
    • Optional auto-sizing to fill content or a container node
    • Auto-adjust dimensions in response to user-controlled font-size adjustments
    • Variable row height
    • Selection by row and multirows
    • Column layout may be changed on the fly by users and code
    • Resizing of the grid on the fly by users and code

We’ve received tremendous community sponsorship in the form of development efforts to port the grid to the new Dojo codebase, which has not been a small undertaking given the broad feature set and resulting complexity of the grid widget. We’ve also received major commitments to add new features to the Dojo Grid such as accessibility, internationalization, and dojo.data integration. And SitePen, of course, is also contributing both in financial sponsorship and ongoing development efforts, as well as leading the charge to make the Grid an Open Source reality. This is an excellent example of open source collaboration and the amazing things that happen when intelligent organizations work together to make a difference.

19 Responses to “The Dojo Grid”

  1. Ajaxian » Plugging in to the Dojo Grid says:

    […] Dylan says that the single, most asked question with the Dojo 0.9 release has been, “Where’s the grid widget?”. […]

  2. Harry says:

    I cannot wait for seeing this released in an official version. Thanks for the hard work.

  3. Arturo Estigarribia says:

    Where can I downloaded? No matter if it is beta. I want it!

  4. Dojo Gains A Grid » By Don Albrecht » article » Ajax Bestiary says:

    […] For More information you can read the SitePen release here:http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2007/09/16/the-dojo-grid/ […]

  5. Don Albrecht says:

    I’ve been waiting for a good grid widget for Dojo for a while. Jury rigging other table’s into a Dojo Ap has been a headache. Thanks for the new tool

  6. Dojo Inherits a Grid by jpsykes says:

    […] It’s great to here that Dojo will be getting a 1st class grid widget for 1.0. […]

  7. Perry says:

    Will this new grid support server side paging and sorting?

  8. Dylan says:

    @Perry: yes, that’s where the dojo.data integration work comes in handy.

  9. John Resig - Freeing the Grid says:

    […] Recently, Mozilla had the opportunity to help do something quite new and free a piece of JavaScript software, namely the TurboAjax TurboGrid. The code has been freed under the auspices of the Dojo Foundation, becoming a new Dojo Grid component. […]

  10. ckeene says:

    From the press release, “TurboAjax Group, now part of ActiveGrid, is an Enterprise Web 2.0 solution for application developers.”

    You can find out more about the grid by going to http://dev.activegrid.com

  11. SitePen Blog » Blog Archive » Dojo Grid Update says:

    […] Recently, the first draft of the new Dojo Grid made its way into the DojoX trunk. There’s still a significant amount of work to complete prior to the Dojo 1.0 launch date of October 31, but if you update your subversion checkout to head, you can follow along at home. […]

  12. Jeff says:

    will this Grid support a right mouse menu? It will be widely used in our product.

  13. Hack Your Life » Blog Archive » HOWTO: Dojo Grid, Checkbox Selection says:

    […] In the release of of Memoratiâ„¢, I am going to use the new Dojo Grid widget. One of the problems I had, is that the grid does selection the way desktop grids do: […]

  14. SitePen Blog » Blog Archive » Bayeux as JSON, Python Cometd Improvements says:

    […] We’ve been working on a number of improvements to the Python implementation of Cometd. Cometd is one of the many open source projects that SitePen supports (DWR, Dojo Toolkit, Dojo Offline, Dojo Grid, etc.). We’re committed to improving open source products by adding new features and improving performance and reliability. […]

  15. SitePen Blog Blog » Simple Dojo Grids says:

    […] We’re excited about the release of Dojo 1.0. In honor of the new release, I’m starting a series on one of the newest additions to the Dojo mix: the Dojo Grid. […]

  16. Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Dojo 1.x: Industrial Strength Open Web Tech says:

    […] app shows all kinds of great stuff including tons of custom widgets as well as extensive use of the Grid. To keep loading of the app quick, AOL is using custom builds to pull Dojo from a CDN and a number […]

  17. zachleat.com {web} » Rethinking JavaScript Grids and DataTables says:

    […] Another popular one is jQuery’s TableSorter. Then there’s the Dojo Grid, a component inherited from TurboAjax. ExtJS has a variety of nice examples as well for their Ext 2.0 […]

  18. liquid says:

    Thanks for the article. Is it possible to have dojo progress meter in a grid column?
    And also how to add rows dynamically?
    thanks

  19. scavenger says:

    great, but … there’s NO grid or table widget since the release of dojo ???

    how can you manage datas out of a mysql database ???

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