ag-Grid VS mui-datatables

In this post I’ll show you how, using the AG Grid component and Ably Spaces, you can create a React application that allows users to see not only who else is currently viewing the grid, but using a Flowbite Avatar Stack component, what row each user currently has selected.

something like ag-grid? https://github.com/ag-grid/ag-grid

I personally use https://www.ag-grid.com/ for all my data grid needs. It has a free community version (that should get you covered imo) as well as a paid one with advanced features.

To be fair, in any GUI toolkit, the "table" is abolutely the most complex general purpose widget. People really under estimate the difficult of an efficient implementation. Qt spents YEARS improving their QTableWidget class. The implementation is mind-bogglingly complex. I am sure many very smart summer interns (PhDs!) have tried to tweak that class to squeeze every bit of performance possible. The table class in GTK+ and MSFT DotNet's WPF are equally, freakishly insane.

Consider this idea: Most people who use a table class in a GUI framework assume it is essentially infinitely scalable (myself included!). I am talking about millions of rows or thousands of columns with all kinds of silly widgets injected into individual cells. It is a crazy hard computer science problem to solve. I would not doubt there are many PhD thesises written on the topic of fast, scalable table widgets.

Beyond desktop GUI toolkits, people have tried to do the same in a browser (HTML/CSS/JS). Have you seen AG-Grid? Woah, it is unbelievable how much goddamn data you can squeeze into that widget. Most Wall Streets web-based trading apps use it one way or another. It's just so hard to beat. Ref: https://www.ag-grid.com/ There must be 1,000 person years of optimisation sunk into that implementation.

MUI-Datatables is a library that is good overall, visually well designed, and even still maintained enough to stay up to date with MUI v5. However, it lacks good documentation and can be hard to figure out how to use. It no longer has a documentation site, so the API section in the README is the only documentation that you get. It is also worth noting that at the time of writing, there are almost 600 open and unresolved issues in the GitHub repo, and non of the issues seem to get any attention from the maintainers. Overall, I would not recommend starting new projects with this library in 2023.

I am using this table https://github.com/gregnb/mui-datatables

Yes, I've seen there are some implementation of datatables using react (https://github.com/gregnb/mui-datatables for example) but I've never used those, also you would still need to implement the server side processing in rails yourself, while the other gems I've mentioned make that pretty easy (filtering, sorting and paginating)