Has anyone compared the ComponentOne ASP.NET AJAX suite to other libraries such as ExtJS

Question

I know that the main draw to ASP.NET AJAX is the fact that you can build it nicely inside of Visual Studio and it is nice and easy. I am finding ASP.NET AJAX limiting, but I really like .NET and figure that a separate javascript library is probably the way to go for responsive apps that are easy to maintain.

I know that within the group (Dojo, ExtJS, MooTools...) there will be differences of opinion, but I am really curious to hear the results of effort and maintainability from people who have gone to or from the .NET component route. Thank you.

Edit: This largely about ComponentOne's AJAX suite. I am new to ComponentOne, but have an opportunity to either embrace their library or push for something more appropriate. Our needs are customer facing and must be highly configurable. Many of our applications are reports while some are themselves application configuration tools.

Answer 1

My experience is that using ASP.NET AJAX controls, such as ComponentArt for example, tend to be limiting and force your design decisions. I have had much better success using pure JavaScript libraries for the UI Layer like jQuery/jQuery UI and ExtJS. Having the serverside render your JavaScript in the ASP.NET way gets complex when dealing with an advanced UI.

Answer 2

Clay, if reporting is your focus then I would definitely go with ComponentOne. C1 has really powerful reporting tools in .NET and a pretty sweet report viewer in ASP.NET. C1's reporting tools can also use existing Crystal, SQL Server, and Access reports.

However, ComponentOne has been asking themselves the same question about server controls and JS libraries. So they built a completely stand-alone library called Wijmo. Wijmo is built on jQuery/jQuery UI and has over 30 widgets included in the kit. Wijmo even has rich data controls like grids and SVG charts that would would normally see in ASP.NET. It was originally built to be used in ASP.NET MVC as the UI layer. Here is a video on how to use Wijmo in MVC.

This same technology is being extended into the ComponentOne ASP.NET controls. So with choosing ComponentOne you will have both options based on the same client-side framework.Note that the Wijmo ASP.NET controls are still in the works and should be out in the summer of 2011.