Anybody knows a good JavaScript UI (Widget) Library [closed]

Question

Recently I had to develop several web applications. I did extensive research regarding JavaScript UI Libraries but I haven't been able to find one I was really satisfied with. What I mean with UI libraries is a library which provides user-controls such as buttons, combo boxes, grids, charts, layout, ...

What I found so far and why I didn't like it a 100%

• jQuery UI has too few controls. (I know there are a lot of plugins and you can nearly find everything but it is not the same as a complete library made and tested by one team or group)
• Dijit (Dojo). I really like this one but when I try to use it in my websites I'm always having troubles. They don't seem to be as easy to use as other libs.
• YUI version 2 had a lot of controls, but the "new" version 3 still misses many controls. (or I am just too dumb to find them) I don't want to work with both versions at the same time or use an old version which will be replaced soon.
• DHTMLX has many controls and they work really well, but the controls themselves lack many features. (for example the HTMLEditor does not even support to change the text color out of the box or I could not find an easy way to expand/collapse tree nodes with some sort of animation)

If anybody knows of a good library which I have not tried yet or knows how I could use one of the above libraries "better" I would be really happy. I am wondering why at this point (where web-apps are getting so important) I still can't find a complete UI framework which would provide me with controls which you can find in other environments since years (or even decades) - for example Java, .net or Delphi to name just a few.

edit:

I know there won't be a library with every control I ever need, but what I expect from such a library is at least: consistent skins, api, documentation, validation and the most important controls you'd need in business apps/websites (datepicker, button, editor with support for numerical data, grid/tree, layout controls, HTML editor) AND the possibility to create your own controls. good to have: charts or reporting

Answer 1

Ext JS provides the best GUI widgets by far. I've used it for a large intranet project, and have been completely satisfied. It's available under GPLv3 and a commercial license.

Be extremely careful when evaluating open-source frameworks. They tend to religiously promote the quality of their projects, but I've found that poor documentation and buggy code are pervasive. Dojo claims heavy industry involvement, but their documentation is poor, and it's not hard to find bugs on their website (the dijit example pages have been broken for months at a time...).

Answer 2

Your comment about JQueryUI is very telling.

As you say, JQueryUI does provide relatively few controls, but has a lot of plugins available. But you're looking for a single library with everything you want built-in.

This is a tough ask, because we don't actually know what widgets you really want, which ones you like the sound of but probably wouldn't use, or which ones you'd use but only if they worked exactly the way you want.

It's virtually impossible to predict all the widgets that someone may want, or how they want them to work. And even if a given library does get it exactly right, when your needs change slightly in the wrong direction, suddenly the library you chose could turn out to be a poor choice rather than the right one.

This is why flexibility and maintainability are far more important than getting an exact feature match. Once you go beyond the basic set of widgets, most others are built on top of the simple ones anyway, but everyone has their own ideas about how they should be implemented, and new UI concepts are being thought up every day. This is why the plug-in model works so well, and why I feel you're making a mistake in discounting JQueryUI because most of the widgets are available as plug-in. In fact, I would say that this model is likely to be the best solution for you.

There are a number of other libraries available which you haven't mentioned. Mootools and Prototype are probably the best well known, but there are others too. Rather than list them all, I'll point you to this page on Wikipedia, which lists them all in a comparative table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_frameworks

I hope you find that helpful. But I suspect you won't find any library in that list that comes with every widget you'd ever want, all in one bundle. They all rely on plug-ins, because the library developers are generally focusing on making a framework for widgets, rather the widgets themselves.