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  10/07/2002 News: Faster Grids  
 

Judging by recent emails, it seems some of you have uncovered the pieces of the new Listgrid, namely Headerbar and Grid.
Here's a quick FAQ on these...

YES, these are new.
YES, they will ultimately form a new Listgrid.
YES, this grid is way faster than the current Listgrid. 11 times faster in fact*
NO, it's not ready yet.

The Headerbar component fixes a lot of the annoying behaviours present in the current Listgrid. Items like the "ghost" div floating below the control when dragging col headers, or the col resize "grabbers" getting misplaced. A lot of the tricks I learned when working on the Window component have gone into the Headerbar, and I think it will be quite stable when complete.

The Grid speed enhancements are due to rendering tricks, inspired by tests performed by Thiago Sayão. They are a hybrid of sorts, combining the flexibility and power of Themes, with the horsepower of CSS. This new rendering layer is transparent to the developer and will not affect the way you interact with the grid. If you look closely, you'll discover a new css.js unit which handles rules at runtime.

If you are so inclined to play with things, feel free to pull down the hourly_build and have it.


* - Speed comparisons based on time needed to completely render 1000 rows on IE6. Mozilla 1.0 speeds are only 7 times faster. Time to render 1000 rows is roughly 4 seconds in both browsers (2GHz machine w/ 1GB ram)

Comments

Tue Oct 8, 2002 Thiago Sayao
Thanks Darin!
Tue Oct 8, 2002 kabuki [registered v4]
Way to go!
Thu Oct 10, 2002 mozilla speedup
i saw in bugzilla that mozilla is twice as slow using global variables and local variables due to security checks not being cached...
Fri Oct 11, 2002 Thiago Sayao
"Mozilla 1.0 speeds are only 7 times faster" doesnt mean that its slower than I.E, it could mean that mozilla is faster than I.E with the other grid method! :)

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