15 Years of UI Components - The Story Behind jQWidgets and Smart UI
From jQWidgets in 2011 to Smart UI web components and now SvGrid for Svelte 5 - the throughline behind the team and what we have learned shipping components for over a decade.
SvGrid did not appear out of nowhere. It is the latest product from a team that has been shipping UI components since 2011. This is the story of how we got here, and what a decade and a half of building grids taught us.
2011: jQWidgets and the jqxGrid
We started in the jQuery era with jQWidgets - a suite of widgets anchored by jqxGrid, a data grid that had to be fast on the browsers of the time. That constraint shaped how we think to this day: a grid is a performance product first. Users do not forgive a table that stutters when they scroll, sort, or type in a filter.
Over the years jQWidgets components found their way into enterprise software at companies you know - Samsung, Boeing, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Nokia, and Intel among thousands of others. Shipping into environments like that teaches you to value stability, backward compatibility, and accessibility over chasing trends.
The web components era: Smart UI
As the platform matured, we rebuilt our component library on web standards - custom elements - and launched it as Smart UI on htmlelements.com. Web Components let one component run in React, Angular, Vue, or plain HTML, which matched how real engineering teams actually work: heterogeneous, long-lived, and rarely on a single framework.
Smart UI keeps moving. The 26.0.0 release brought Pro Themes - Material 3, Fluent, Strata, and Tabula - plus data grid modularity improvements and AI-assisted API documentation. And the work continues into 2026 with a roadmap that leans hard into AI: an MCP server, an AI-assisted dashboard builder, smart data-grid summaries, and AI-powered paste.
Recognition
In Visual Studio Magazine's 2025 Readers' Choice Awards, Smart UI was voted Gold Winner among software development service providers. Awards are not the point - shipping is - but it is good to know the people who use the tools every day rate them highly.
2026: SvGrid for Svelte 5
Which brings us to SvGrid. When Svelte 5 introduced runes, we saw a chance to build a data grid that exploits fine-grained reactivity natively rather than wrapping an engine designed for another model. So we wrote a new grid from scratch, with a headless core and a render component, MIT-licensed at its heart.
What 15 years taught us
A few principles carry through every product we have built:
- Performance is a feature, not an optimization. Virtualization, stable references, and minimal repaints are designed in from the start.
- Accessibility is the default, not a setting. WAI-ARIA roles and full keyboard support ship on by default because retrofitting them never works.
- Meet developers where they are. That meant jQuery in 2011, web components later, native Svelte today, and AI assistants now.
- Honesty builds trust. Our comparison pages tell you when a competitor is the better choice. Developers see through marketing; they respond to candor.
Where we are headed
The same team that has shipped grids for over a decade is now all-in on two things: native framework-first components, and AI-native tooling so assistants can use our libraries correctly. SvGrid is where those threads meet.
Frequently asked questions
How long has the team behind SvGrid been building UI components?
Since 2011 - first jQWidgets and jqxGrid, then the Smart UI web components on htmlelements.com, and now SvGrid for Svelte 5.
What is the relationship between SvGrid, jQWidgets, and Smart UI?
They are all products from the same team. jQWidgets is the original jQuery-era suite, Smart UI is the web-components library on htmlelements.com, and SvGrid is the new native Svelte 5 data grid.