Hi!
We are evaluating your widgets (until then xTree, xGrid and xTab), and we plan to buy a professional license, if we find it useable. Because we have found it very complex, and well designed, and it looked very flexible. They know mostly everything we need, and they are very good stuff at all.
But after a short testing period, a lot of hard stuff and bugs came out.
I don’t want to insult you with such a thing, so sorry, if i say anything offending, but i have to let you know about the problems we have faced to, because your toolkit is very good, but not perfect:
- The formatted source codes in the src folder are very good and commented, but after a deeper look at it, we saw, that it is a little bit messy, and not so exact, as we saw at first time. It not just means, that its a bit complicated, but it means for example, that none of the widgets’ dhtmlXCommon.js’ file equals exactly to each other, however they should be!
- Not only the source code, but the documentations are very messy, however, they are well edited and useful, but there are a lot of problems in those…
- Our main problem was that none of the examples, or the source code on your home page, or the docs file shows the same solution for an issue. For example, I searched after how to implement a component and use the themes and the functions and the xml. But every place I’d seen, showed different and different solutions for the 4 lines method to create an instance, and set it on the page. And mostly none of them said the things well. Also we didn’t understood, why the tree and the tabs are created in the doOnLoad function, and the dhtmlXGrid can’t be created there, only after the
- In the ‘examples’ folders, there are a lot of xml files, but it is not too clear, which xml file should we use, and which iswi compatibe with the example shown on the examples page…
- The example source codes often contains mistakes, from missing semicolons to completely mistyped function names, or not valid html codes.
- If you change the background of a tab, as it said on the exaple page,with “setSkinColors()”, only the background changes, and the tab itself not, and there are no additional docs about how to correct this, so i don’t know, if i should change or delete a picture, rewrite some functions or rewrite some css codes, or it can’t be changed, or what… and that stands for a lot of the functionalities.
- There is a lot of stuff missing from the downloaded packets, and there are some functions, which basicly doesn’t do the thing they are for, or even they doesn’t exists in the package, for example:
tree.setIconSize() function, or Vista Theme images from all of the imgs folder,…
- There are also not so much documentations about the parts, what file contains what, what we have to implement for this or that functionality.
And unfortunately we couldn’t look after deeper settings, f.e. how to connect widgets or how to redesign the existing styles or components, if we want to.
- There is no such error handling in any of the components, which basically means, if a function fails by getting a bad parameter, or some error happens, there is no result of the error, nothing happens, and the widget is not shown on the webpage. Only from mozilla firebug we know, that some of the inner functions of the component failed.
- On your site, you claim, that the stuff is compatible with most of the browsers, but it is not fully true, f.e. we have tested the stuff under IE5.0, and none of the widgets work.
- And till then, we didn’t even reach a point to try the compatibility between components, the cooperation with database or php, or ajax functionality.
Neither of these would be such a problem individually, but,if you see the big picture, we found the dhtmlX components very complicated and problematic to develop with.
