Introducing Wijmo, a feature-packed jQueryUI based widget library:
Lately I have been evaluating a few JavaScript based UI libraries for both my projects at work and to use for a new version of the bike climbs site called
39x27.com: it was quite nice to see that almost all component vendors are now embracing, some more than others, JavaScript together with the more traditional Web Controls for ASP.NET Web Forms.
In this post I’m going to briefly cover the reasons why I ended up choosing
Wijmo, and then I’m giving a quick introduction on the set of widgets available.
Why Wijmo?
My first, and only strict requirement was that it had to be based on
jQuery: everybody in my team knows it, it is the more used JavaScript library, so new developers and contractors coming are likely to know it, and ASP.NET MVC and the
ASP.NET Single Page Application depends on it (see, ASP.NET MVC validation,
Knockout.js,
upshot.js). That excluded libraries like
ExtJS.
All the buzz lately is about
KendoUI, a jQuery-based UI widget library developed by
Telerik, so it was the first library I looked at: it’s based on jQuery, and is available also with a OSS license (GPLv3). It has lots of widgets, both for
web UI element and for
drawing charts and they are developing also some
mobile UI controls. And it’s use feels natural,
looks like jQueryUI: you create a HTML element, you select it via jQuery and then enhance it via a KendoUI specific JavaScript function.
What I didn’t like is that they reinvented the wheel: one line
