Are Ribbons the New Tabs?

The other day I was thinking, In our product, it would be cool to implement navigation and related tasks with an Office 2007 ribbon metaphor. Then I went to the Microsoft Office home page and saw they already had that going. Well, today Telerik made available a sample of how to build a ribbon with their controls. Go check out, it’s definitely cool.

Technically, ribbons go hand-in-hand with tabs, except that they also group and provide quick access to related tasks. I feel that as web applications get richer, having plain tabs (even with a lot of CSS to make them look good) that simply emulate switching among tasks won’t be sufficient in many cases.

That's pretty sweet. I dig.

I'm curious if you've spent any time exploring the various commercially available control packages (Telerik, Infragistics, ComponentArt, dotNetCharting, etc..). If so, I'd be interesting in seeing an impartial review.

Well, I can give you only a biased view. :) We've been working with Telerik for some time now. They provide great support, have a large variety of awesome server controls which helped us a great deal. And I like their overall attutitude to running a business.

I haven't had first-hand experience with Infragistics, but I've been approached multiple times by people unhappy with them (they claimed Infragistics grew too complacent), and every time I forwarded them to Telerik, whose products are better anyway.

As to ComponentArt, you need to ask Scott Watermasysk, he's dealt with them more than I have.

Thanks for the info. I've demoed controls from both Infragistics and Telerik recently. I haven't been super impressed with either one. Maybe things get better when you're a paying customer? I've found both of their controls to be under under-documented, and support to be very slow. I'm not sure about Telerik, but I suspect that part of Infragistics motivation is that without good documentation, they have a better chance of selling their high priced training packages.

I really don't see how ribbons will possibly replace tabs ... ribbons are only useful when they group functions that apply to a common and ever-present target. They work well in office application because they simplify the grouping of utilities and tools that all operate on a document that remains visible/editable throughout.

The new 'menu' on the Office homepage is a nice visual tribute to their new ribbon tool bars, but it adds nothing to functionality of those pages: it is merely primary (tabs) and secondary (ribbon) navigation.

Beware using any metaphor based on it's coolness or recency factor.

Shane, with component vendors, documentation is always a moving target because of the speed of development and short shipping cycles . Telerik do a pretty good job of keeping documentation up to date. Documentation can aways be better, and I believe this is the case even with Microsoft.

Once you become a paying customer, you do get a "shortcut" by way of support tickets. Other than that, I've found their online forums very helpful. Only very few occasions did I actually open a ticket. I pretty much always get an answer in the forums.

Milan,

Nice of you to create the cheat sheets.

Btw, I welcome you to try our ASP.Net components: Developer Express. We have full Ajax support, excellent support but more importantly a very happy client base.

Thx.

-Mehul

I chose infragistics asp.net tools based on my past experience with their windows controls.

What a mistake. I don't recommend this product to anyone! I open support issues about their HTML editor and I get responses like, "you have not deployed correctly" This just infurates me. I put in one request about the HTML editor not able to load an html doc. Their response: "We did not design this for large HTML docs". Excuse me? Define "large". No where in their documentation can find a document size limit.

Their update panel does not work when the server is taxed. After five seconds or so, the connection appears to timeout and no response is ever received. Even when it is received, it is way to slow.
The update panel has forced us to rewrie several pages using JSON and client side script.

I think they've outsource their development and/or support based on the names of the people I've had contacts with. This alone explains the drop in quality of their product.


I've not used all of their controls but so far I've got egg on my face for choosing this vendor.

I recommend: http://www.perpetuumsoft.com/ ASP.Net components.

Support without problems, use-proven solutions.

Good work, guys!