Clarify relationship with vaadin-grid?

[victorhooi]

Sorry if this is an obvious question - but what exactly is the relationship between iron-data-table and vaadin-grid?

(As in, the main developer of iron-data-table also works on vaadin-grid, right?).

Do they share ideas, or are they targeting different use-cases? Is this something worth making clear in the README?

[Saulis]

Hi!

I get this question sometimes, and yes it could be worth writing it down for people to see.

There's no official relationship between the two – I do work in the Vaadin Elements team and <iron-data-table> was something I started as a personal research/hobby project.

Now that <iron-data-table> has gotten some traction and there have been valuable learnings, we're going to apply our new knowledge to improve <vaadin-grid>.

My current focus is, with the help of my team at Vaadin, making the upcoming <vaadin-grid> 2.0 even better than <iron-data-table>. I can't promise the new grid will have all the same features that <iron-data-table> has, but I will try to get all the most important stuff included.

If you're interested, you can check out the latest demos here: https://cdn.vaadin.com/vaadin-components/preview/vaadin-grid/demo/

What will happen to <iron-data-table> ? I'll continue maintaining as much as I have time, but still, it will remain as a hobby. Kinda my hopes for the future are that users will find the new <vaadin-grid> better and will join us improving it even further!

[victorhooi]

Awesome - I saw there was a new preview release recently as well, will definitely check it out.

Also - from a design perspective, are either iron-data-table or vaadin-grid aiming to follow the Material Design specs?

https://material.google.com/components/data-tables.html#

I noticed the vaadin-grid homepage mentioned being inspired by - will vaadin-grid 2.0 follow the MD guidelines more closely?

[web-padawan]

@victorhooi FYI we have our own element: https://github.com/OWOX/brainy-table
It is an iron-data-table fork rewritten with dom-repeat which mostly follows material design guidelines, although some features are not yet implemented (e. g. rows selection).

[Saulis]

@victorhooi Vaadin Elements currently, as said, are inspired by MD specs, but don't follow them to the letter. As MD is quite strictly defined, we're moving towards having our own theme(s) that would allow the users to alter the look-and-feel really flexibly.

I recommend watching the Polymer Summit talk by our Product Designer @jouni about theming: https://youtu.be/n8xrfe-XjfI?t=1183

In general, <iron-data-table> is designed to ship without much styling, but the default-styles.html are inspired by MD. Currently, I don't have any plans on changing those.

[jouni]

@victorhool We still plan to support/ship MD inspired styles for vaadin-grid 2.0. We’ll try to stick as close to the soecs as possible, or at least make it possible to customize it so you can make the final tweaks to it.