It is a great honor to introduce you to Wijmo 5, our new generation of JavaScript Controls. This is a monumental release for us, because it marks a significant shift in our product line. Wijmo 5 is a set of JavaScript Controls, not to be confused with Widgets (Wijmo 3). We have taken a step back from the industry to rethink what JS UI components should be. What we have come up with is high quality Controls, similar to what you would find in .NET, with significantly improved syntax over Widgets. Of course, there is much more to Wijmo 5 than the fact that we have created a new type of JavaScript UI Control Architecture. Wijmo 5 is mobile-first, fast, lightweight, flexible and has first-class AngularJS support. This video gives a great introduction to Wijmo 5.
If you want to hear more about our architecture and experience developing Wijmo 5, you can watch this video.
What's in Wijmo 5?
Wijmo 5 has been focused on quality, not quantity. So you will notice that our Control list is not long, but each Control is very polished. We also don't want to reinvent any wheels. Our samples use Bootstrap for layout and simple UI components like buttons, etc.
What are the requirements?
- Modern Browsers (IE9+, ECMAScript 5)
- jQuery (this is Wijmo’s only dependency)
Why require ECMAScript5?
- Real properties (with getters/setters)
- JSON support
- SVG graphics
- Better arrays, bind method, etc.
- Smaller and more efficient (no hacks to support legacy browsers)
Core
- Base Control
- Globalization
- CollectionView
- Themes
DataGrid
- FlexGrid
Input
- ListBox
- ComboBox
- AutoComplete
- Menu
- Calendar
- InputDate, InputTime
- InputNumber
Data Visualization
- FlexChart
- FlexPie
- LinearGauge
- RadialGauge
- BulletGraph
FlexGrid for JavaScript
If you are a developer that has been around since the early days of VB, then you probably know of our famous FlexGrid Control. It was so good, that Microsoft actually included it in Visual Studio.aspx). The Control was written by our now CTO, Bernardo Castilho. He has evolved and improved this Control throughout different platforms for the past 20 years. And now, he has written the JavaScript version! FlexGrid has a principle behind its design: flexibility. FlexGrid focuses on staying lean and fast, and using extensibility to offer features.
ICollectionView for JavaScript
Wijmo has a solid infrastructure based on a powerful and familiar data layer. The main data binding interface is ICollectionView, which provides currency, filtering, grouping, and sorting services. Wijmo also includes the IEditableCollectionView and IPagedCollectionView interfaces, which support editing and paging. Wijmo’s ICollectionView interface is virtually identical to the one in .NET, so if you know .NET you will feel right at home.
First Class Angular Support
AngularJS is one of the most popular and powerful JavaScript application frameworks today. We believe it will continue to gain popularity and will set the direction of the next Web. For this reason, we ship and maintain AngularJS directives for all of our controls, and use it in most of our samples. Of course, you can also use Wijmo with other frameworks, and we may add official support for them in the future if our customers require it.
Get Started with Wijmo 5
To get started with Wijmo 5, you should download the evaluation. The eval includes everything you need to get started, including samples, js/css files, and even Visual Studio Project Templates. We also have some great samples online for exploring Wijmo 5. If you want to run through all of our Controls and capabilities, I would suggest going straight for the Wijmo 5 Explorer. To see Wijmo 5 in a mobile application, check out our Ionic Expense Tracker. To learn how to use the Controls I highly recommend walking through the 101 Samples: FlexGrid 101, CollectionView 101, FlexChart 101, Gauge 101. To see how Wijmo 5 stacks up against the competition, check out our Benchmark Sample. To learn how to integrate with data services, take a look at these samples: Firebase, BreezeJS, OData. All of these samples are included in our download, so make sure you download Wijmo 5 to dive deeper into the source code of these applications. Wijmo 5 features high quality documentation that you can read online. This new documentation format was home grown and optimized to document JavaScript Controls.
What About Wijmo 3?
Don’t worry, we will be maintaining and releasing Wijmo 3 (previously named Wijmo Professional) into the foreseeable future. We built a product of widgets that uses Progressive Enhancement and works everywhere, including IE6. Wijmo 3 is still a viable product for many customers and we will continue to support them. We wanted to build a new product that targeted more modern browsers and creating a clean separation gave us that freedom. So use Wijmo 5 if you are targeting IE9 and up and use Wijmo 3 if you need legacy browser support.
Chris Bannon