What's benefit using jQuery Autocomplete over Ajax AutoCompleteExtender? Can some one explains the benefits one over another?
+1
A:
I would vote for the jQuery Autocomplete. Although the MS ajax toolkit still seems to be a live project the Microsoft team have turned their focus to jQuery and producing jQuery plugins of their own. From a personnel point of view developing anything with the control toolkit extenders was a bloated, buggy and generally painful experience especially when you needed to slightly tweak or extend the default behaviour of the controls.
A major benefit is the level of support. The user base for anything jQuery is huge now. If you encounter a bug a patch or workaround will come around much quicker than if you find an issue with an extender - especially on StackOverflow!
The extender would be ok if you had zero javascript experience and needed to drag and drop a widget to roll a prototype quickly but if you have any jQuery experience or none but a little time on your hands it is well worth learning how to use the jQuery Autocomplete version.
redsquare
2010-06-29 19:02:06
+1, although I do sometimes use a few of those extenders. We went through a whole love affair with update panels and then broke up with them for the most part.
Brian MacKay
2010-06-29 19:04:38
But you then get the bloat of all the base ms ajax libraries + the nasty toolkit js.
redsquare
2010-06-29 19:06:48
Update panels are also very dangerous beasts....in the wrong hands!
redsquare
2010-06-29 19:07:49
What about the performance? Both does asynchronous postback?
shailesh
2010-06-29 20:21:00
Yes both can use ajax to get the data. You will have to set both up and monitor the js rendering times (profile using firebug), I do not have the ajax toolkit installed to do a comparison, nor do I use webforms anymore. Maybe you should try this comparison as part of your investigation.
redsquare
2010-06-29 21:16:40
Thanks redsquare.
shailesh
2010-06-29 22:00:47