Start Building Professional
Web Apps Today

Hi! We are evaluating your widgets until then xTree, xGrid and and we plan to buy a professional license, if we find it useable. Because we have found it very complex, and well designed, and it looked very flexible. They ...

Hi!

We are evaluating your widgets (until then xTree, xGrid and xTab), and we plan to buy a professional license, if we find it useable. Because we have found it very complex, and well designed, and it looked very flexible. They know mostly everything we need, and they are very good stuff at all.

But after a short testing period, a lot of hard stuff and bugs came out.

I don't want to insult you with such a thing, so sorry, if i say anything offending, but i have to let you know about the problems we have faced to, because your toolkit is very good, but not perfect:


- The formatted source codes in the src folder are very good and commented, but after a deeper look at it, we saw, that it is a little bit messy, and not so exact, as we saw at first time. It not just means, that its a bit complicated, but it means for example, that none of the widgets' dhtmlXCommon.js' file equals exactly to each other, however they should be!

- Not only the source code, but the documentations are very messy, however, they are well edited and useful, but there are a lot of problems in those...

- Our main problem was that none of the examples, or the source code on your home page, or the docs file shows the same solution for an issue. For example, I searched after how to implement a component and use the themes and the functions and the xml. But every place I'd seen, showed different and different solutions for the 4 lines method to create an instance, and set it on the page. And mostly none of them said the things well. Also we didn't understood, why the tree and the tabs are created in the doOnLoad function, and the dhtmlXGrid can't be created there, only after the <div id="gridbox"></div> element.

- In the 'examples' folders, there are a lot of xml files, but it is not too clear, which xml file should we use, and which iswi compatibe with the example shown on the examples page...

- The example source codes often contains mistakes, from missing semicolons to completely mistyped function names, or not valid html codes.

- If you change the background of a tab, as it said on the exaple page,with "setSkinColors()", only the background changes, and the tab itself not, and there are no additional docs about how to correct this, so i don't know, if i should change or delete a picture, rewrite some functions or rewrite some css codes, or it can't be changed, or what... and that stands for a lot of the functionalities.

- There is a lot of stuff missing from the downloaded packets, and there are some functions, which basicly doesn't do the thing they are for, or even they doesn't exists in the package, for example:

tree.setIconSize() function, or Vista Theme images from all of the imgs folder,...

- There are also not so much documentations about the parts, what file contains what, what we have to implement for this or that functionality.
And unfortunately we couldn't look after deeper settings, f.e. how to connect widgets or how to redesign the existing styles or components, if we want to.

- There is no such error handling in any of the components, which basically means, if a function fails by getting a bad parameter, or some error happens, there is no result of the error, nothing happens, and the widget is not shown on the webpage. Only from mozilla firebug we know, that some of the inner functions of the component failed.

- On your site, you claim, that the stuff is compatible with most of the browsers, but it is not fully true, f.e. we have tested the stuff under IE5.0, and none of the widgets work.

- And till then, we didn't even reach a point to try the compatibility between components, the cooperation with database or php, or ajax functionality.

Neither of these would be such a problem individually, but,if you see the big picture, we found the dhtmlX components very complicated and problematic to develop with.:(

- that none of the widgets' dhtmlXCommon.js' file equals exactly to each other, however they should be!
The versions of component was released in different time, latest versions contains additional fetures moved to common js file and some fixes in it.
Basically dhtmlxCommon.js from ANY latest package will work with ALL components, but to get all latest fixes it recommended to use latest version of dhtmlxCommon.js (version with latest date)

- Not only the source code, but the documentations are very messy, however, they are well edited and useful, but there are a lot of problems in those...
Please post your suggestion how existing documentation can be improved

- Our main problem was that none of the examples, or the source code on your home page, or the docs file shows the same solution for an issue.
The component is flexible and can be configured in many different ways, I really don't see why we need to use the same initialization in all samples, any of shown initizations are valid and can be used in real code.

- Also we didn't understood, why the tree and the tabs are created in the doOnLoad function, and the dhtmlXGrid can't be created there, only after the <div id="gridbox"></div> element.
There is no such limitation. Both tree and grid can be initialized in any moment and from any place of HTML page ( the only requirement - target container already must exists )
In case of dhtmlxGrid in IE - there are one more additional limitation - you can place init code anywhere but if it placed inside not closed table ( script code placed before closing "TABLE" tag ) IE provides incorrect object sizes and as result initial look of grid will be distorted ( it can be fixed by calling grid.setSizes() later )

- On your site, you claim, that the stuff is compatible with most of the browsers, but it is not fully true, f.e. we have tested the stuff under IE5.0, and none of the widgets work.
dhtmlxTree, dhtmlxToolbar, dhtmlxMenu - IE5+ ( there is some limitation in case of IE5 because it doesn't support full JS syntax, in case of dhtmlxTree it better to use dhtmlxTree 1.4 with IE5 )
dhtmlxGrid, dhtmlxTreeGrid, dhtmlxTabbar, dhtmlxCombo - IE5.5+

- And till then, we didn't even reach a point to try the compatibility between components, the cooperation with database or php, or ajax functionality.
I'm not sure what do you  mean "compatibility between components", because all dhtmlx component can work with each other ( basically , because they doesn't extend base objects, and don't use global variables - they must be compatible with most JS frameworks around ) The standard set doesn't provide any way to comunicate with DB ( except loading from XML stream ), the pro version contains a simple extension ( dataProcessor ) which allows to sync view with DB

we found the dhtmlX components very complicated and problematic to develop with.:(
Our lines of products is not "silver bullet", it just allow to safe your time on UI development, but to implement some complex functionality in your specific way you still need custom coding.