WEBIX JAVASCRIPT LIBRARY BLOG

The reason

Webix is mostly a UI framework, it is oriented for usage in complex client side apps with a lot of controls and complex business logic. At the same time, it can be effectively used for solving common tasks without the necessity of learning any third party libraries. Let’s check these Webix features by creating a simple “ToDo” app. The ToDo App is like a “Hello World” for frameworks. It is the basic app, which shows how the main functionality of the framework can be used.

You can grab the code of final version from GitHub or check the online demo.

One of the key advantages of the Webix library is the ability to work on both desktop and mobile devices. A web-based user interface created with Webix will work properly on both platforms. Still there are some recommendations which will help you to achieve a better user experience while developing your mobile web app.

In this article I’ll try to describe the most significant features of mobile applications development. Let’s go into details by creating a simple ‘contact list’ app. This is a common app that allows users to create a contact list, look up the necessary contacts and view their details.

You can download the full sources of the actual working application from the github repo or go check a live demo.

Not so long ago, the drag-and-drop functionality was used in web apps quite rarely. With HTML5 coming on the scene, native drag-and-drop has become easily accessible and popular. The functionality that required lots of coding efforts before, now can be added with a few lines of HTML code. While developing the Webix library, we tried to keep all features and advantages of native drag-and-drop. At the same time, we’ve added new capabilities that might be useful in web app development.

Component Level Drag-and-Drop

While HTML5 drag-and-drop is focused on an HTML element, Webix drag-and-drop concentrates on the UI components. For example, try to drag items between the tree and the grid in the demo below:

One of the Webix’s great advantages is the possibility to use the third-party components. Obviously, instead of reinventing the wheel, it is better to take advantage of reliable, ready to use solutions. Especially now when the open source community is actively developing and supporting a variety of interesting libraries.

The standard Webix pack already includes wrappers for such popular solutions as Google Maps, FCK Editor, D3 charts and lots of others. However, it is a drop in the ocean. Every day new js libraries appear, and it’s impossible to provide support to all of them out of the box. Instead of this, Webix allows creating new integration for any third party library by, literally, several lines. Lets check how it can be done.

As you may know from the previous article JS Grid with 1 000 000 rows, DataTable is not limited by the number of rows. What about columns?

The above example shows a grid with 1 000 columns. Yep, it is not a million, but still quite impressive, isn’t it?