ASPxGridView Product Review

Thinking Out Loud
14 November 2007

Having just finished up with a blog entry discussing why we re-wrote the ASPxGridView and the importance of performance in our product planning, it was nice to see the following review of the product.

http://www.aspnetpro.com/productreviews/2007/11/asp200711so_p/asp200711so_p.asp

To quote the article

"No Competition

Contrary to the experiences cited above, ASPxGridView has a small and highly efficient client-side JavaScript library that executes faster than any other Web grid I’ve tried (and I’ve tried most of them)."

So, if you did not believe us, perhaps you can believe Steve Orr - the ASPxGridView is FAST. :-)

Download - Compare - Decide

 

Free DevExpress Products – Get Your Copy Today

The following free DevExpress product offers remain available. Should you have any questions about the free offers below, please submit a ticket via the DevExpress Support Center at your convenience. We’ll be happy to follow-up.
Anonymous
Adam

I have been using one of your competitors for quite some time now and I have been quite OK with it. Performance has not been lightning fast but it has been very easy to use this grid. Once I saw your claims that the new DevEx grid is very quick I decided to give it a try. The example you refer to is very vague and does not help at all – it just has some animated GIFs and does not really show anything … just plain marketing. Once I have tried your grid in my actual pages it did not help anything – it is NOT faster and output is NOT smaller than what I use now, performance is even a bit worse than what I have now. Please reconsider your marketing messages as you are doing yourself damage with examples using animated GIFs and hard-coded values without any real comparison. How exactly are you doing your comparisons? Are you using the same settings and operations? It is probably the case that you have optimized your grid and put the other "market-leading" grids in "slow" mode…

14 November 2007
Anonymous
Craig

I think your grid is great, except for one *major* issue. The reliance on using XPO for many of the advanced features. We already use nHibernate so don't need XPO but had to cancel our order for your grid when it was discovered we could not do things like server side paging. This is a disappointment as the overall quality of the grid is very high.

14 November 2007
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)

Adam

If you are actually being truthful and have actually done the same comparisons then you would see the radical difference.

Are you telling me that in whatever grid you are using you are able to group 300k rows in 2 seconds or less (or sort that many rows, or page that many rows, etc)?

You see our results - Im ready to look at yours.

Here is my email address: rayn@devexpress.com

Ive shown you how fast our grid groups data - now show me how fast your grid groups 300,000 rows.

Talk is cheap - the facts speak for themselves. Let me requote what appeared in the ASP.NET Pro magazine review

"No Competition

Contrary to the experiences cited above, ASPxGridView has a small and highly efficient client-side JavaScript library that executes faster than any other Web grid I’ve tried (and I’ve tried most of them)."

14 November 2007
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)

Craig

Sorry mate, but not sure I understand what advanced feature you are speaking of. No advanced feature in the grid requires XPO. The way the grid uses XPO is to fully realize the power of advanced grid features such as grouping/sorting/summary computation without bring a server or the client to its knees against very large datasets (let me repeat that last bit - XPO's utility is in its smart query capabilities which are best suited against very large datasets). This use of XPO is not meant to replace anything you do with products like nHibernate. They should co-exist just fine.

14 November 2007
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)

Craig,

All the advanced features are available without using eXpressPersistent Objects (XPO). The XPODataSource is an (unparalleled) option that can be used when working with very large datasets. The ASPxGridView is still an amazing grid without using it.

Thanks.

14 November 2007
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)

Adam,

"It is probably the case that you have optimized your grid and put the other "market-leading" grids in "slow" mode…

"

There is no "slow mode" in the other grids and the ASPxGridView is optimized out of the box. We're always happy to hear constructive criticism but you offer none.

14 November 2007
Anonymous
Craig

Hi Mehul, Can you point me to some documentation on how to implement server side paging and grouping without using XPODataSource.

14 November 2007
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)

What blows me away with posts like that from Adam is the natural tendancy to belive that people will lie and cheat for the sake of business interests...

Here is Steve Orr - a highly respected member of the development community - describing in his article the factual problems with grid controls for ASP.NET. He clearly spells out why its such a huge problem to push lots of data into a grid control. Our demo *only* shows perf benchmarks in this scenario...yet Adam pays no attention to the facts Steve lays out for *any* grid control in this scenario and then suggests we found a way to push the magic slow button on competing products. WOW!

14 November 2007
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)
Mehul Harry (DevExpress)

Hi Craig,

You can implement the IListServer interface to get the same benefits but this task isn't trivial. Please take a look at this knowledgebase article: www.devexpress.com/.../A1022.aspx

Glad to hear you liked the ASPxGridView and if you need some help transitioning, please don't hesitate to contact me. The eXpressPersistent Objects is an option for the large datasets and you can still incorporate it with your current architecture. Use it for the pages where you need display large amounts of data.

Thanks.

14 November 2007
Phil Wright
Phil Wright

Its discusting how these people whinge and point fingers without actually posting facts of their testing, and if they are so sure of a "SLOW" mode coded in why not purchase the Source Code??  

How about Adam posts his actual tests before flaming the Marketing Campaign and Steve Orr's review??

14 November 2007
Rollie Claro
Rollie Claro

I think here is the catch

DevExpress offers the source code as part of a subscription.

now, why can't the competitors catch up?

this is mind bugling.

now, you try incorporating the grid to your project, just because it takes time to configure the grid properly and you end up frustrated, does not mean the grid is not good enough.

instead of incorporating the grid to your pages, why not make a separate page and do the comparison? or at least have the wit to read the reviews before jumping to any conclusion?

-but thats just me

15 November 2007
Don Thomas
Don Thomas

I am currently testing your grid against one of your competitors. First, I used a small dataset (5 records) and was amazed at how fast it was compared to the competitor. I then moved to one of our production databases and tested it on a larger recordset with a different competitors grid on the same page. It was still faster. I do not know how you guys do it, but i am really impressed.

Also, your grid was intuitive to set up. It seems pretty close to the standard asp.net gridview control in terms of setup, just way better. Setting up paging was incredibly easy.

The footprint of your grid compared to the competitors grid in production was amazingly small.

I think your grid is fast. I do not know what that Adam guy is talking about.

15 November 2007
Anonymous
Craig

Thank Mehul. I was aware of the IListServer requirement to get it to work. As you say this is not a trivial task and I started to try and get it to work but it was too much without proper documentation. Throwing in a few XPO components here and there for large datasets is not really an option as all that does is make our nicely structured architecture messy. I would recommend cleaning up this whole IListServer stuff so it is easy to get virtual paging, grouping etc working with non-XPO datasources and you will make many people very happy.

15 November 2007
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)

Adam, I still have not received an email from you.

19 November 2007
RAUL TORTIMA
RAUL TORTIMA

I have to leave here my comment.

The moment I decided to buy a 3rd party web grid component, I started looking at most of the available grid in the market.

That includes Telerik, Infragistics and such.

My opinion is: aspxgridview is far the best product available in the market.

Its a brand new one, so its expected to have some stuff to improve, yet it presents lots of amazing features, not necessarly only related to performance.

Performance is great indeed, for sure no other product would beat it. All the tests Ive done were loading large datasets and I can say most grids just stuck where as aspxgridview behaved like a breeze.

Devexpress has been doing an excelent job, maybe Adam is speaking as a competitor, thats the only reason I see to post such a comment!

20 November 2007
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)
Ray Navasarkian (DevExpress)

Thanks Raul - I dont know where Adam was coming from but i certainly cannot allow anyone (even when they post hit and run messages anonymously) to tell me that we do unethical things.

As far as competitors go - some claim their grids are the "fastest" - hopefully we will have content up soon that blows this marketing mumbo jumbo out of the water once and for all and makes facts available for everyone to make their own determination as to what is fast and what is slow.

21 November 2007
Anonymous
SK Jain

I am evaluating the XPO or server mode for one  of my clients who is currently using the DevExpress in the classic mode.

I liked the XPO samples they are very fast as claimed by the sales.  However, the biggest limitation I find is that XPO works great as long as you have a simple table structure or a simple view. The moment you have a complex query , neither XPO nor the LinqServerMode works. It can't even support complex primary key. Not sure why the primary key is required for read-only grids.  

The ASP.NET gridview and linqdatasource works like a charm without the primary key criteria

Anybody has deployed DevExpress grid with a complex query with 6-7 joins and no primary keys ?

27 April 2009

Please login or register to post comments.