After much deliberation, I have decided to use dhtmlXGrid to develop a portal widget for Dataface.  This will improve the usability of Dataface for complex data sources dramatically.  Among other reasons, I have chosen dhtmlXGrid because:

 <ol>   <li>It is available under GPL.</li>     <li>It seems really cool!! and polished.</li>   </ol>     <p>My initial observations are:</p>   <ol>  <li>Documentation and examples seem to be quite good and mature.</li>   <li>There doesn't seem to be a forum or mailing list available.</li>   <li>I am only using the Standard edition.&nbsp; The enterprise edition is not open source.&nbsp;</li>  </ol>   <p>One of the things that I like about this component is that you can load it with XML.&nbsp; This should make it relatively easy to define dataface actions that just output XML that is compatiblle with a the grid.&nbsp; I am stuck in a couple of spots, however.</p> <ol> <li>I can't see how to define como-boxes and select lists using XML.&nbsp; There are examples using javascript to programatically define them (which is okay), but I would rather do everything from XML.</li> <li>.. okay only one thing right now...&nbsp;</li> </ol> <p>I will scour the source code a little bit more and will probably end up emailing the company who makes it to ask about this one.. as it is pretty important.</p><p>The lack of a forum or community provisions seems a little limiting.&nbsp; I feel inclined to set up my own &quot;fan&quot; community site for this, if I begin using it a lot.</p><p>&nbsp;More on this later when I have some results.<br /></p>