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Telerik Dev Tool Claims First AngularJS 2 UI Support

• By David Ramel
• January 22, 2016

The newest release of the Telerik DevCraft development suite is the first in the dev tooling market to feature support for building UIs on top of AngularJS 2 JavaScript-based applications, claims its parent company, Progress Software.

DevCraft is a toolbox aimed at constructing UIs for apps based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, running on mobile devices, the Web or the desktop. Progress, which acquired original DevCraft developer Telerik in 2014, is emphasizing support for the latest rendition of AngularJS, a popular open source JavaScript framework developed by Google. AngularJS 2 is now in the alpha preview stage, with a beta program expected to commence next quarter.

AngularJS developers say it takes a different approach to addressing the fundamental Web development problem "that HTML was not designed for dynamic views." It uses Directives to extend HTML attributes and Expressions to bind data to HTML, an approach alternative to other frameworks that abstract away HTML, CSS or JavaScript or provide an imperative way for manipulating the DOM.

"What it brings to the table that other frameworks don't is convenient code separation, declarative databinding and routing, components creation, form validation, event management and many more," Progress says on its site.

"Early adopters of AngularJS 2 can utilize the Telerik Kendo UI product [a DevCraft component] to easily produce beautiful responsive Web apps on top of the AngularJS 2 Preview," Progress said in a statement yesterday.

Although it provides a great foundation for Web development, Telerik said AngularJS doesn't come with out-of-the-box support for creating UIs. For that, it offers Kendo UI, an HTML5/JavaScript framework that includes more than 70 UI widgets that the company says are "built with AngularJS in mind."

The new DevCraft release also features increased support for one of the latest Web development techniques, the "responsive Web." The company said it has provided responsive Web functionality across its products for all of the main Web platforms, HTML5, Web Forms, MVC, PHP and JSP.

"Today's release extends those capabilities with improved forward-thinking responsive Web behaviors, new responsive demos and greatly enhanced mobile rendering and gesture support," the company said. "In addition, the Telerik Web UI tools in the Telerik DevCraft suite enable developers to quickly and easily produce highly responsive, touch-friendly Web apps for the platform of their choice, using a plethora of new productivity improvements. These include new Visual Studio app templates and improved Smart Tags in UI for ASP.NET AJAX."