Telerik, a provider of UI components and developer tools for Web, desktop and mobile apps, today unveiled its next major release of Kendo UI, a collection of Web, data-visualization and management tools for professional software developers.

In this release, the Kendo UI framework adds support for tablet UIs with the addition of a complete set of controls and widgets for creating rich iPad UIs. Kendo UI’s three new widgets are the WebGrid, ModalView and PopOver widgets.

This release also debuts server-side wrappers for ASP.NET MVC in order to extend and simplify the development of HTML5 and JavaScript mobile apps and sites.

Kendo UI’s WebGrid widget can now be used instead of JavaScript, thanks to the new Kendo UI server-side wrappers.

The ModalView widget lets developers display a “window” within a mobile or tablet app that is positioned on top of all other app content.

The PopOver widget helps developers create native tablet experiences. It also displays a window that is layered on top of other app content when a button is clicked.

According to a company statement, these updates allow developers to use Kendo Mobile UI’s unique adaptive rendering to target multiple phone and tablet platforms with a single UI codebase, thus eliminating the traditional challenges that developers face in manually researching and combining all of the plug-ins, frameworks and libraries needed to build mobile apps.

“With this release—our second major release of the year—we really wanted to focus on two major themes,” Todd Anglin, VP of HTML5 Web and mobile development tools at Telerik, told SD Times. “We can tell that, within the industry, there are two important things happening: Tablets are becoming an increasingly important part of the business information worker’s workday, increasingly being seen as replacements for many common tasks where PCs used to reign. So developers…need solutions for creating those tablet apps a lot more effectively.”

The second theme, according to Anglin, as more developers are coming into the HTML5 and JavaScript camp—and coming from traditional server-side languages like Java and ASP.NET—they are looking for ways to maintain that level of productivity that they have been familiar with when working in server-side environments as they start working with client-side technology such as HTML5 and JavaScript.

“To serve both of those trends, we’re really excited to introduce in this release both tablet-specific UI widgets, things particularly designed to help developers create apps that look and feel native on tablets, especially the iPad,” Anglin said. “We’re also introducing new server-side wrappers for Kendo UI, targeting the ASP.NET MVC developer. So now those developers can get the same kind of server-side productivity with Kendo UI that they have been used to for decades of server-side development.”

More information about the Kendo UI framework can be found at www.kendoui.com.