In this week’s episode of Adventures in Angular the panel interviews Shlomi Assaf, talking about ngrid. After some playful banter about the naming of Ngrid, Shlomi shares the reasons behind building ngrid. The company he was working for at the time need a grid, he tested nggrid but wanted something completely opensource, so he built one. He also explains that nggrid caused some problems in their project which made him want something more customizable.

 

Shlomi explains how much work is needed on the application and asks listeners to contribute to documentation or other areas of the project. Shai Reznik endorses Shlomi as one of the smartest peoples he knows and tells listeners if they want to learn from someone who knows a lot about angular to step up and join this project. 

 

The panel asks about the challenges Shlomi faced while building this app and what it was like using the CDK. Nggrid has a how company working on it but ngrid has only Shlomi. Shlomi explains that the CDK had a lot of the building blocks need to building blocks to build this application and was the power behind the project. The CDK’s lacks the ability to extend easily which was a challenge. He explains that his biggest frustration while building the application was the drag and drop feature. 

 

Shlomi shares many of the features he built into the application that even though he built it over a three year period he could do it piece by piece because of the way he designed it. He considers the selling points of the application and shares them with the panel. Shlomi compares ngrid to other grid, explaining how templating, creating columns and pagination are all made easier with ngrid. With ngrid there is also virtual scrolling and you can control the width of each column. 

Next, the pane considers performance, asking how the grid would handle if you loaded thousand or even tens of thousands of records and data onto the grid. Shlomi explains that unless the cells were extremely complex that ngrid’s performance would not suffer. The panel how ngrid could work with serverside rendering but not with NativeScript. Shlomi explains version support and advises listeners to use Angular 8.

 

The panel ends the episode by sharing information about next year's ng-conf. Tickets go on sale on October 1, 2019, the best deals go fast so watch out for them. Many of the panel will be there, Brian Love will be giving the Angular Fundamentals Two-Day Workshop. The CFP also opens October 1, 2019, and will close January 1, 2019. Aaron Frost invites anyone who would like to submit to reach out to the veteran panelists to nail down ideas for their conference proposals. He also recommends submitting more than one.