News

Kendo: New Unified Framework for HTML5 and JavaScript

• By John K. Waters
• November 30, 2011

Developer tools and solutions provider Telerik today launched a new front-end development framework for building applications and Web sites with HTML 5 and JavaScript. The new Kendo UI is designed to simplify the adoption of what the company sees as a rapidly evolving dev platform.

"Building applications and sites today with HTML 5 and JavaScript is an exercise in self-assembling an array of libraries and toolsets to compose a platform that has all of the necessary components for development," Todd Anglin, EVP of Telerik's Kendo UI group, explained in a statement. "This approach is acceptable for hobby projects, but it is fraught with support and licensing risks, it is difficult to maintain and upgrade, it is difficult to learn and it wastes valuable development time. Kendo UI solves this problem by providing a unified framework with all of the necessary components for building HTML 5 and JavaScript apps and sites."

The Kendo UI framework is built on top of the jQuery cross-browser JavaScript library. It's designed to leverage the CSS3, HTML 5, and JavaScript web standards. And it supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and mobile browsers on iOS and Android.

Telerik is billing Kendo UI as a solution for JavaScript and HTML 5 developers that delivers "everything needed for modern, standards-based application and site development." The company is delivering the framework in three packages: Kendo UI Web, which includes more than a dozen rich HTML 5 JavaScript UI widgets, including a Grid, along with such framework components as a Data Source, touch-enabled drag-and-drop and a JavaScript templating engine; Kendo UI DataViz, which provides a dedicated suite of HTML 5 -powered data visualization widgets, including animated charts; and Kendo UI Mobile CTP, an early preview of Kendo UI widgets for building mobile apps with HTML 5 .

This release also serves as an opportunity for Telerik to move beyond its .NET roots and "apply its knowledge and expertise to providing tools for the broader world of HTML 5 and JavaScript developers," Telerik's CEO Svetozar Georgiev added. "Developers today, faced with an increasingly fragmented computing landscape, are turning to HTML 5 and JavaScript to build software that can run anywhere and reach the largest possible audience."

Kendo UI is available now under both a commercial license and the open source GPLv3 license. Trial downloads of the Kendo UI components are available here.