Comments on: jsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree component

By: slightlyoff

slightlyoff — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:55:44 +0000

you’re right about Dojo’s tree WRT DnD and editing (although many people are successfully adding editing through the hooks we already provide in the Tree). What we’ve focused on is accessibility and dojo.data backing which has allowed the Dojo Tree widget to handle lazy-loading of data, editing, gigantic data sets, and the ability to be constructed out of nearly any data format: pure HTML, CSV, XML, web services, JSON, lazy-loaded versions of many of the above, and more. All through the same APIs and data formats which are used to feed drop-down widgets, grids, and many other Dijit and DojoX widgets. I won’t really touch accessibility, but needless to say it’s non-trivial to do right. We look forward to a day when others consider a widget “done” only when it provides a good user experience to *everyone* and not before that.

Regards

By: vakata

vakata — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:09:11 +0000

Since I got a few emails complaining there is no way for people to contact me I put up a blog where everyone can comment, criticize and propose new ideas.

By: kolev

kolev — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:42:35 +0000

@vakata: Great job, Ivan! Your jsTree is most probably the best web tree component I’ve seen to date!

By: vakata

vakata — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:43:22 +0000

@Nosredna:
Sorry for the documentation – I plan on polishing it and giving some more examples very soon. Yes, the callbacks are the way to get data from the server – the example will be up soon (basically you pass the state parameter “closed”, and use the onopen callback). I intend on implementing async loading internally.

@Jeria:
The next minor version will feature animations (thanks jQuery), but they will be optional/configurable.

By: Jeria

Jeria — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:23:20 +0000

I feel that animations in tree’s are quite annoying. Thank god that Windows or Mac OS X don’t use animations in their tree’s.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:58:31 +0000

The links to the examples in the documentation are bad.

I don’t see any mention of getting data from the server. I assume that’s left as an exercise for the user? The callbacks are the way to do that?

By: vakata

vakata — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:52:17 +0000

@GlenLipka:
Thanks, this is indeed useful! I will go over the points this evening and also add the option for smooth animation.

By: GlenLipka

GlenLipka — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:42:17 +0000

Nice work. I agree that some graphic and interaction design would improve it a bit. I had written a UX design pattern for trees a while back. Maybe it’s helpful?
http://commadot.com/the-ux-of-trees-design-pattern/

One minor thing would be to animate the open/close of the nodes. Its a small but significant aspect that would improve the general feel. I wonder also if there are royalty free open/close icons around.

By: OndraM

OndraM — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:57:51 +0000

neat! I like it. It certainly beats my implementation of jquery tree…

By: mauricesnip

mauricesnip — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:31:40 +0000

That would probably be: Google Code page and the Examples page

By: maccmania

maccmania — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:24:13 +0000

Err, link?