Addressing the needs of enterprise Java developers as well as those of people with disabilities, Telerik today released the third version of its Kendo UI framework, which consists of the DataViz, Web and mobile tool sets for building HTML5 and JavaScript websites and mobile apps.
Kendo UI’s winter release includes a beta of JavaServer Pages (JSP) server wrappers in Kendo UI; HTML5-based interactive candlestick and open-high-low-close financial charts in Kendo UI DataViz; support for cross-platform theme previews in Kendo UI Mobile; and accessibility standard support in Kendo UI Web.
The Kendo UI Complete package includes Mobile, Web and DataViz, and costs US$699 per developer, royalty-free, with free updates and unlimited support tickets for one year. Bought separately, Kendo UI Mobile costs US$199 per developer, royalty-free, with free updates and 10 support tickets for one year. Also bought separately, Kendo UI Web and Kendo UI DataViz each costs US$399 per developer, royalty-free, with free updates and 10 support tickets for one year.
In its previous release, Kendo UI included server-side wrappers for ASP.NET MVC to extend and simplify the development of HTML5 and JavaScript mobile apps and sites. This latest release introduces JSP server wrappers that will help Java developers build HTML5 mobile apps and sites. The company said that the Java wrappers will be generally available in early 2013.
Kendo UI DataViz provides developers with HTML5-based charts and gauges. “Financial charts are particularly important for enterprises because, very often, financial data is the thing that is being shown or reported,” said Todd Anglin, vice president at Telerik. “So, in this version of DataViz, we’re adding the candlestick chart type and the open-high-low-close chart type—two common chart types for presenting financial data. The open-high-low-close shows you, in a very compact visualization, all the different values visualized in a single data point.”
Rich chart interactivity has also been added to Kendo UI DataViz. “Users of these charts can now very easily pan the data, zoom in on specific segments of the data, and generally work with it in a more interactive way,” Anglin said. “This allows developers to provide large datasets that users can then dissect and find their own insights and create their own analysis.”
Additional features and performance improvements have been added to all parts of the Kendo UI framework. Kendo UI Mobile now includes a mobile ThemeBuilder tool that gives developers customizable, real-time theme previews for Android, BlackBerry, iOS and MeeGo. Kendo UI Mobile now also has support for cross-platform gestures (such as tap, double-tap, swipe and pinch/zoom), and new transitions and hardware-accelerated animations that the company said help mobile apps to look and feel native. Also, KendoUI DataViz has added ThemeBuilder support, which lets developers customize chart styles without writing any code. And KendoUI Web now also includes right-to-left language support for all Web widgets.
To meet the needs of people with disabilities, Kendo UI Web now supports the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification (WAI-ARIA). “WAI-ARIA is a specification that makes this kind of modern HTML5 and JavaScript UI far more usable by users who are using the content with accessible browsers,” Anglin said. “WAI-ARIA—and what we’re doing by supporting it—primarily addresses vision impairment because accessible screen readers and assisted technology like that can now understand what a Kendo UI widget is on a page. So now a menu is a menu, not just a collection of HTML5 and JavaScript. It creates a far more descriptive experience for those users using that kind of assisted technology.”
Kendo UI Web now also includes high-contrast themes that the company said exceed the contrast ratio recommendation of WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). The WCAG 2.0 is, according to its website, a W3C Recommendation aimed at making Web content more accessible to people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, and photosensitivity.
“People with vision impairment often have trouble seeing contrast when these nice, fun Web themes are used,” said Anglin. “So we’re delivering a high-contrast theme that developers can easily apply to their Kendo UI applications. We’ve taken extra care to make sure the contrast ratio between the elements exceeds the standards specified by WCAG 2.0. So developers will benefit from this in their own apps simply by consuming this new high-contrast theme.”
