Telerik UI controls vs client-side UI with jQuery

Question

I am trying decide on how I want to handle the UI for an external-facing web app. Because it is external, latency caused by page bloat could be an issue.

I have used jQuery some in the past, and I am evaluating the Telerik controls now. I have seen a lot of good recommendations on the Telerik controls, including some on StackOverflow. Indeed they do seem fairly full-featured. I also have no doubt that I can develop the application much more quickly using those controls than I can with jQuery. However, I am worried that they will cause too much bloat on my pages.

Do any of you have experience comparing the performance of these controls against a purely jQuery implementation? Specifically,

• Is the RadScriptManager from Telerik really any better than the MS Ajax ScriptManager?
• Are there performance issues in general with the Telerik controls?
• Is there any plug-in for jQuery that comes close to the grid functionality of RadGrid?

Any other related information would be useful as well.

Answer 1

I've used Telerik and JQuery for years. "Full featured" generally equates to tons of bloat, features you don't need and a final page that is hard (or impossible) to optimize. Drop Telerik and use a bare metal framework like JQuery. You'll find that it will allow you to build the specific functionality you need and you'll never go back. Many of the full featured UI suites like (like Telerik or ComponentArt) are very seductive but I think they encourage a lot of bad programming.

For instance.... Do you really need to have drag-and-drop-able columns on your grid? Probably not. It's probably better to have a design area where your users can layout their column preferences and then the main view where the grid is snappy and lightweight. Don't render down megabytes of added features that your users will never (or rarely) use with every page view.