[m_mueller]

In typical HN fashion the most cranky post gets voted to the top.

- Hungarian notation is 'the most insane naming convention' you have ever seen? Really? I'm guessing you haven't seen a lot.

- 'There are many alternatives with a much saner API' - proceeding with not naming any, and the ones mentioned below all are lacking in features compared to DataTables - everything else I've seen tends to be a one trick pony. Obviously something with not many features is going to have a simpler API.

Please note: I do agree that the API could be better - also, it depends on how many powerful features you want, whether DataTables is going to be worth it. As someone who usually develops in rich desktop environments I tend to demand more of tables, and to program all those features from scratch would use an insane amount of time on the web.

[jessedhillon]

As far as alternatives go, it's trivial to reproduce most of DataTables' functionality with AngularJS by binding an array of objects to a template for a table. Of course DataTables has been available for years, but I have to agree that the API is atrocious. There's no excuse to be using Hungarian Notation in 20xx, but even without the naming conventions the way some of the functions are invoked and arguments are constructed is just bizarre. Parsing HTTP parameters is laborious and error-prone IIRC.

(Again IIRC some arguments, such as which column to sort on by default, are the actual integer index into the columns array -- i.e. pass a 1 to sort on the second column. The last time I saw anything like this was when I was looking at Quake3 source, written in C!)

However it does the job well once it's all set up and for a long time it was miles ahead of any other option. Only ExtJS and YUI grids are/were better but those require large frameworks and a number of assets to be in place. I would never advise someone to use it today though, I have to say. I used it once for a critical project and in retrospect I would have rolled my own, despite time constraints.

[m_mueller]

Thanks, that's way more helpful. In my case I didn't think about using Angular since I wanted the templating to be serverside in general - it's an interesting idea to use it only for the asynchronous parts.

I don't get the hate for Hungarian notation and 0 based column index though. I wouldn't use Hungarian myself but I don't complain about it either - for dynamic typed languages it makes enough sense to me, since it conveys the desired type information without too much clutter. How would you specify the column of a html table? IDs don't really make sense since it could be inconsistent or missing - I guess a 1 based index might be better for consistency with CSS, but it's not really something that makes me want to switch framework.

[jessedhillon]

I would require each column object to have a unique name property and then expect references to those columns to be by name. Column objects are configuration, completely separate from markup.

[debaserab2]

Sure, I could give you a google search results list of table sorting libraries. As I mentioned in several other comments, I usually specialize based on what my needs are. There was a point in time when DataTables was your only option for certain things, but that point has passed. I've also found that some of the bigger problems that DataTables solves (data modeling, dom manipulation, dom rendering) are handled better at the framework level (angular particularly shines here) than with a javascript table library.