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Kendo UI HTML5 Framework Updated for Responsive Design

• By John K. Waters
• April 3, 2015

Developer tools and solutions provider Telerik is enhancing its Kendo UI framework with a new set of features that address growing enterprise developer demand for tools for responsive design.

Kendo UI is an HTML5, jQuery-based framework for building modern Web apps. The framework features lots of UI widgets (more than 70, the company says), a "rich" data visualization framework, an auto-adaptive mobile framework, and a bunch of tools for HTML5 app development, such as data source, templates, MVVM and drag-and-drop components. And it's integrated with AngularJS Web application framework, and it supports the Bootstrap

"Responsive design" is nothing new. Web and mobile developers have been using the responsive approach to create Web sites (like this one) and apps that work equally well on multiple screens for some time. In a multi-screen world, app responsiveness has become a competitive necessity, and the enterprise is catching up now in a big way, says Burke Holland, director of developer relations at Telerik.

"We see an increasing awareness of the advantages of responsive design in the enterprise," Holland told ADTmag. "It's really caught on in the last six months."

Responsive design is about more than just making things smaller, Holland argued. In fact, what Telerik supports in Kendo UI is more like adaptive design, he said.

"Just shrinking things to fit is technically responsive design, but it's not very responsive," he said. "This is about more than just optimizing screen real estate. It's about changing the widgets so they actually function better on a smaller screen, and doing it automatically for the developer."

Building responsive (or adaptive) apps also provides better code coverage. "Which means you can build one app that works across form factors and you only have to install it in one place," he said. "This is very important to our enterprise customers."

This Kendo UI update includes a number of new widgets that allow developers to create so-called hamburger menus for smaller screens; to show the same Grid or TreeList content on desktops, tablets, and phones, or specify different settings for each device; to hide automatically the left section of the SplitView widget with on-demand visibility; and to shift the overflow of view options in Scheduler into dropdown lists or offer date abbreviations. This release also includes a number of updates to several popular Kendo widgets for things like export capabilities and excel-like filtering.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Telerik, which was acquired by Progress Software last year, 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.

A free trial download of the complete Kendo UI is available online here. The open source Kendo UI Core, which includes 23 widgets, is available on Github here.