Windows component provider Syncfusion announced on July 23 the release of Essential Studio for JavaScript, a suite of 30 JavaScript client-side controls and components.

The company said the suite is for Web developers who need client-side components that satisfy line-of-business needs. “Most JavaScript suites today weren’t built with enterprise applications in mind,” said Daniel Jebaraj, vice president of Syncfusion. “With recent advancements on the client-side, grids render faster, controls are more interactive, and data visualizations such as charts can go places never thought possible.”

Essential Studio for JavaScript gives developers an API suitable for enterprise applications, and includes gauge controls for dashboards, a grid control with grouping support, and an interactive chart control. It also contains an OLAP-based grid control that connects and visualizes business data for analysis. “With line-of-business applications, there’s a lot going on with OLAP—very complex visualizations that dwell in that domain,” Jebaraj said. “The OLAP control shows how this suite is different from other solutions.”

Jebaraj said what Syncfusion has done with the OLAP-based grid control is just a starting point. “You will see many more complex visualizations and many more ideas built around that and related domains, signaling that we want to go further and deliver more of these functional sets,” he said.

Until now, the company had only offered solutions for developers who work with ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, WinForms or WPF. Jebaraj explained why Syncfusion decided to offer a JavaScript edition of Essential Studio now: “It’s really been a gradual kind of change, a keeping up with the market, if you will. Over the last few years, a lot of what we do, even though it’s in the .NET framework, is really rendering to the browser.”

Jebaraj explained how more and more of Syncfusion’s customers are not just using client frameworks like Silverlight and WPF. “A lot of them are using .NET as a back end, running IIS, Windows servers, doing a lot of back-end work on Windows, but then ultimately serving mobile browser clients.”

Jebaraj said supporting JavaScript was a natural next step to take. “As we’ve seen more and more compatible implementations of JavaScript in modern browsers, a lot of people are saying, ‘Why bother with doing some of this rendering on the server and then bringing all this back to the client and so forth? Just do it in the same product line,’ ” he said. “So it was a natural progression for us.”