ActiveWidgets

What is ActiveWidgets?

Small

The library is small and straightforward, easy to learn and easy to work with.

Fast

The components are very fast, even in enterprise Web applications with complex screens and large data sets.

Clean

The API allows you to write clean and simple code that everyone can understand and maintain.

ActiveWidgets is a javascript library for creating user interfaces. It comes with a collection of common UI components (data grid, lists, tabs, buttons, menus, etc.), which can be inserted directly into existing HTML or assembled into functional tiles or full screens.

You don't need to be a javascript expert to work with ActiveWidgets. The most common tasks will require a minimal amount of code, as the library encourages the use of declarative techniques wherever it makes sense (JSON settings for the interactive components, HTML templates for the static content and layout, CSS for the visual appearance).

ActiveWidgets is intended for enterprise developers or anyone who requires the UI to handle large amounts of data, especially using DataGrid components. If you're building screens with large or multiple datagrids and your main concern is the speed and responsiveness of the UI – this library is exactly for you. The main purpose of ActiveWidgets is to offer excellent performance for complex screens with large amounts of data, while remaining simple, compact and easy to learn.

Objects

Objects allow you to set and access properties, handle events, and perform data binding operations.

Properties

ActiveWidgets objects represent the app's view model, and the object's properties encapsulate the state of the view. Properties can be calculated (that is, hold a function instead of a static value) and depend on other properties.

Events

ActiveWidgets receive DOM events from the underlying html elements, trigger property change events, and also enable the augmentation of custom events.

Data connection

ActiveWidgets objects can be configured to display external data through the data binding interface. For example, you can use a form panel to show and edit a data record, or attach an external data source to the data grid component.

Templates

Traditionally, there are two common ways to create user interfaces – through component trees or using html templates. ActiveWidgets lets you use both, depending on the task.

The models and components are tightly integrated - the components themselves are implemented using templates, while the templates allow for very natural inclusion and references from the component tree.

.HTML

The user interface created with the ActiveWidgets library typically consists of several high-level components. However, at the low level, each component is still composed of one or more basic HTML objects, which are rendered in HTML markup before being inserted into the DOM and displayed by the browser.

System Requirements

IE8+ or any recent version of Chrome/Safari/Firefox

Document type doctype mode (quirks mode not supported)

No external dependencies (jQuery is not required, but works well together)

Any type of backend (Java/.NET/PHP/Ruby/static files)