A better front-end library

[wouterj]

Currently, we use jsTree as the front-end library, but I'm not happy about it and after speaking with @dbu and @dantleech I discovered they don't either.

This morning, I started looking at some alternatives, also speaking with the core dev of Typo3 Neos. They currently use DynaTree, but are not happy about it. Mostly, since it's no longer maintained. He gave me some alternatives he found while looking for a replacement. There sure can be others, but I listed the once that jumps out when I searched a bit. I'm happy to know what you think (and if we should move to another lib at all).

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FancyTree

This library seems to be recommended by a lot of people. It's full of features and has an easy to use and understand interface.

Pros

• It has support for lazy loading in core
• Core extensions provide drag 'n drop functionality

Cons

• It requires jQuery
• Lazy loading requires writing the AJAX calls yourself
• Context menu is provided by a 3rd party extension
• Creating nodes has to be implemented

  Ext JS Trees

This is the tree library of the Ext JS framework.

Pros

• It has a good API
• It works really well with lazy loading and a server API
• Being bound to the Ext JS framework, trees can be nicely abstracted in JavaScript objects.

Cons

• The Ext JS brings in complexity

  jqTree

Just another jQuery tree plugin which seems to work pretty well.

Pros

• It's the most simple of the proposed libaries
• It supports context menu and drag 'n drop in core

Cons

• It's written with jQuery
• It doesn't seem to support lazy loading
• It has very little documentation

[lsmith77]

https://github.com/marmelab/tree.js is used by the marmelab phpcr browser

[wouterj]

Closing as we started working on FancyTree