I’m halfway through the Lotus Notes adapter; it’s going to be awwwwwwesome. Each house is going to be associated with a Notes database, and you can add unstructured content to every house through custom-built Domino forms.

Sasha.

P.S. For folks who don’t know Adrian, he’s the guy who originally taught me about virtual list controls back in 1997. We were working at a company called Plumtree Software, and one of the early projects I worked on there was a Lotus Notes adapter for Plumtree’s system. It was, and still remains, the most fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants software project I’ve ever worked on.

–adrian

Interesting point about a server-side pagination triggered by a client-side list. TurboGrid could in theory do this kind of pagination as well, although the idea of keeping cursors open scares me, frankly.

In addition, since we don’t paginate on the map, it doesn’t make as much sense for us to have the grid use a callback that goes to the server when the user scrolls. We have to send a fair amount of data down about each home just in order to show it on the map (where it is, beds, baths, etc.). At that point, we might as well send along the extra fields that the grid needs.

Finally, in our experience the latencies involved in having a user wait around while an AJAX call is out are not good. In previous versions, we would fetch info about a house for the sidepane next to the map once a user clicked a house, and the latency that built in to the UI was extremely annoying for users. In our current dev builds, we’ve spent a lot of time lowering the amount of time that AJAX requests hold up the UI.

As for Ext, it seems to be a pretty good library, and it’s built on YUI, Prototype/Scriptaculous, or comes with its own control library. It doesn’t build on Dojo, although I think it can be used simultaneously with it.

As for the one url/one server-side call, that’s great for a lot of situations, but it’s not so great for us, as we need to distribute the information from the AJAX call to the map, the grid, and the sidepane. We don’t want the grid to do the AJAX calls because we need to use the results in several controls.

Thanks again for the thoughtful comment.

interesting bit of code

Sammy J

http://www.scbr.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGrid/ – if you are not into additional libraries
http://www.extjs.com – with adapters for YUI + jQuery (I think also Dojo because I see you are OK with Dojo).

There are probably others. An intersting thing is that at least with the extjs grid you can have the server return XML or JSON (very nice with Ruby/Rails), have the records correctly packaged, and displayed in the grid with literally one client URL request and one call on the server side.