Question

We’re looking for the best jQuery-based user interface library we can find. It doesn’t have to be free. What are people using?

We’ve used jQueryUI, but development seems to have stalled. Not much new there in a long time.

jQuery Tools looks slick and professional, but it has a very limited number of widgets.

Here’s what we need:

• Menus (horizontal, vertical)
• A date picker
• Tabs
• Autocomplete
• Editable combo box
• A decent grid
• A decent tree
• Dialog boxes
• One of those controls that let you move items from one vertical list to another — not sure what they’re called.

Nice to have, not essential:

• Google Map control
• A file manager

It would also be really nice to have theming like jQueryUI. Anyone know of such a library?

Answer 1

We’ve used jQueryUI, but development seems to have stalled…

Are you sure you’re looking in the right place? I drop by jqueryui.com and I see plenty of recent work being done. Let’s review some of the latest: 1.8 came out in March, and they’ve already done seven maintenance releases (adding features, not just fixing bugs) in the nine months since, the most recent being 1.8.7 less than two weeks ago with tested, certified support for jQuery 1.4.4 (which only came out on November 11th) plus enhancements to various of the controls (Button, DatePicker, …). There’s a fair bit of API cleanup in progress for 1.9 (and new stuff, including menus, which should interest you), they’ve been speaking at conferences, upgrading their CDN. Surely not “stalled”.

I’d think a combination of jQuery UI and a couple of choice plug-ins from the plugins library for things it doesn’t provide would be a good start. Like anything you get for free, you have to test things for yourself and do your own code quality analysis before committing to anything, but…

Looking at your list:

• Menus (horizontal, vertical) – Gap, but 1.9 should at least partially address it (and you can actually use what they have so far in 1.8)
• A date picker – Check
• Tabs – Check
• Autocomplete – Check
• Editable combo box – Check I think; auto-completer can be configured in various ways
• A decent grid – Gap, if you’re talking about light spreadsheet duties a’la ExtJS
• A decent tree – Gap
• Dialog boxes – Check
• One of those controls that let you move items from one vertical list to another — not sure what they’re called – Check, in jQuery UI it’s a configuration of Sortable; demo here

…and moreover the whole thing is very themeable, with clear theme documentation and a variety of pre-built themes available (plus a tool to help you build your own). Themeability is important for integration into websites.

I’m not “rah rah rah” about jQuery UI, I’m just saying, it seems like a project with very, very high standards and high activity, so “stalled” just kind of jumped out at me…