As far as alternatives go, I usually specialize based on what my needs are. Well, the alternative is always to write it yourself. The same could be said for jQ

As far as alternatives go, I usually specialize based on what my needs are. Well, the alternative is always to write it yourself. The same could be said for jQuery or any framework (and many have been advocating doing that) but it's always a trade off between experience/time/resources. I don't think it's really fair to compare a feature rich plugin that provides a lot of generic functionality vs what you can write for a very specific requirement, esp if you don't need the any/most of the functionality in the plugin! I used Datatables a few years ago extensively for a provide, I actually found it very easy to work with - but I understood the notation having come from a VBScript background a long time ago - and as others have said, it was miles ahead of anything else at the time.