News

Kendo UI HTML5 Framework Adds More Server-Side Wrappers

• By John K. Waters
• April 2, 2013

Developer tools and solutions provider Telerik ramped up the enterprise cred of its Kendo UI framework with a new release sporting PHP and JavaServer Pages (JSP) server wrappers.

The Spring 2013 release of the framework for building applications and Web sites with HTML5 and JavaScript (with support for Java) also adds support for Windows Phone 8 and for the Single Page Applications (SPAs) Web architecture.

Telerik introduced server wrappers for the framework last year. The idea is to make it possible for server-side developers to use their existing skills, tools and languages to write code from which the wrappers automatically generate the necessary HTML5 code and spit out the related Kendo UI JavaScript.

"Server wrappers address the reality that, as more and more businesses come into the HTML5 and JavaScript space, a lot of the developers will have built up years -- decades -- of skills in server-side languages, like .NET and Java," Todd Anglin, vice president of Telerik's HTML5 Web and Mobile Tools group, said at the time. "They want to adopt the power of HTML5 and JavaScript, but they want to use the skills and familiar tools that make them productive."

The company added a set of ASP.NET MVC wrappers to the framework last November, when they also announced the beta release of new JSP wrappers and plans to include PHP wrappers.

Telerik launched the Kendo UI framework in late 2011 with a promise to deliver everything developers need to build traditional Web sites and mobile apps. The framework is built on top of the jQuery cross-browser JavaScript library, and it's designed to leverage the CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript Web standards. It supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and the mobile browsers on iOS and Android.

The company is delivering the framework in three packages: Kendo UI Web, which includes rich HTML5 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 HTML5-powered data visualization widgets, including animated charts; and Kendo UI Mobile, which provides widgets for building mobile apps with HTML5 for WinPhone8, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

The company also announced a new website for the incubation of open source integrations with projects like AngularJS and BreezeJS. Dubbed Kendo UI Labs, the site is being billed as a "home for Kendo UI experiments and integrations." The company promises to populate the site with "a myriad of sample repositories and integration libraries" for building Web and hybrid mobile apps using Kendo UI Web, DataViz and Mobile.