A long long time ago, in an office not far away I pondered the need for so much variety in the VisualForce ‘structural’ component library. I mean, dataTables, pageBlockTables, outputPanels, panelGrids, repeats, panelBars.. jeez Louise. And when would I use them all? How should I combine them? If I type google in google will I break the Internet? Okay, I didn’t really ponder the last one, everyone knows that’s true.
Nowadays I’d like to think I have a feel for what to use, and when. More specifically I’m going to dig into when to use dataTables over repeats, and vice versa(The only real difference I can find between pageBlockTable and dataTable is that dataTable has a cool onhover JS handler that highlights the currently onhovered row, so I’m totally going to ignore pageBlockTable. Speak to the hand pageBlockTable, because the face ain’t listening).