Great post. I have been working with JavaScript heavily the last months and I really felt in love with it. I'm interested to start such kind of products, but I don't find any viable idea. I'm thinking of another Data Grid using jQuery. (I already bought jquerygrid.com, anyone has a suggestion if it's a good idea?).
@Author: I would like that you talk to us more about the development and marketing process.
There is definitely room for simpler. jqGrid and others tend to favor convention over configuration. This certainly makes example code shorter. But usually I'm adding the grid to a site with pre-existing data sources, UI conventions, and other requirements. I have to override all the defaults, and the result is less maintainable than if they'd forced me to configure everything up front. In particular I always have to override the AJAX stuff, and it's always ugly.
An easy way to get grid data combined with some statistics/graphs package (e.g. flot) would probably be a good selling point, as lots of applications use both. Not saying that it's a big deal to implement, but you can't ever make it too easy for that kind of stuff...
If you think you can do better than SlickGrid, let me know. I did some in-depth research into JavaScript (specifically, jQuery) datagrids some time ago. You can find it on StackOverflow (I'm Rudiger, the asker): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2402953/javascript-data-g...
My advice is to differentiate; jqGrid and SlickGrid are two very good jQuery datagrids. If you want to compete, do something they don't do (or don't do well).
Maybe a jQuery mobile datagrid? They're far from perfect on the iPhone/iPad... Just a thought.
So Facebook is yet another of those companies where being hired depends on CS/math trivia questions? Apparently a lot of people think it's easier to design a good API than look up Newton's method on Wikipedia.
Well, the man wrote a game engine in JavaScript, so asking him to implement a sqrt() function in JavaScript isn't unheard of. They don't ask "math trivia" questions of every interviewee, but here it seems relevant.
Not to diminish the awesome work this guy has done.
When you're writing a game engine, your main concern is performance. Not using the built-in javascript sqrt() and rolling out your own would be woefully inefficient.
That question would have made more sense for an engine in C, building your own fixed-point sqrt() for example.
sqrt and its approximations seems a bit too low-level, both for what he did and what Facebook is doing. This is the kind of stuff you look up, as opposed to other algorithmic difficulties that arise out of total different situations where without a good general background you wouldn't even know what to research.
Questions about trees, graphs etc. would seem more appropriate for game development (and probably for Facebook in general).
But that's just me. Sqrt might even be a good question if he's a recent graduate and they want to see if he still can think back a couple of years...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] thread@Author: I would like that you talk to us more about the development and marketing process.
Can you explain how it can be better than SlickGrid? (other than that)
Maybe a jQuery mobile datagrid? They're far from perfect on the iPhone/iPad... Just a thought.
Not to diminish the awesome work this guy has done.
That question would have made more sense for an engine in C, building your own fixed-point sqrt() for example.
Questions about trees, graphs etc. would seem more appropriate for game development (and probably for Facebook in general).
But that's just me. Sqrt might even be a good question if he's a recent graduate and they want to see if he still can think back a couple of years...