The number of awesome libraries for HTML5 + CSS3 + JS is overwhelming. Pretty much every day I find something absolutely awesome, that I’d like to give a try the very second I spotted it. What is more, the vast majority of those are free, so personally I see a very little justification for buying expensive widget libraries like KendoUI (http://www.kendoui.com/) - even if personally I’m a fan of Kendo :)
Anyway, here comes one of my recent findings: Gridster (http://gridster.net/).
Using Gridster, you can create tile-based, configurable and stunning good-looking dashboard-like user interfaces :) Metro style at your service - bend it as much as you’d like.
Gridster supports (http://gridster.net/#demos):
- dynamic tile creation
- dragging & dropping
- resizing (permanent and on focus) …
- … and serialization of tile positioning
If you’re aiming to create a dashboard of customizable “controls”, most likely you won’t find anything better to aid you with the layout boilerplate.
Gridster is open-source (https://github.com/ducksboard/gridster.js), most likely isn’t as JS-light as you’d like and it depends on jQuery (actually it’s jQuery’s plugin). It’s also pretty fresh (all the releases and not older than 1 month), but tbh I didn’t find any bugs that’d question its usability in current version.
Recommended - it’s a very promising library (or maybe dashboard-like, configurables UIs are just my weakness…). Just imagine combining Gridster with Twitter Flight’s event approach - yummie!
