Kendo UI Simplifies Mobile App Development with HTML5 and JavaScript

Kendo UI is a revolutionary way to create web and mobile applications using JavaScript and HTML5. It is a collection of Web, Data Visualization and Mobile tools targeted at professional software developers providing everything needed for front-end development with JavaScript and HTML5 for websites and mobile apps. The developer has a choice of UI widgets, templates and themes, powerful datasource support, Model-View framework support, universal drag and drop support and others to come up with functionally rich front end of applications in a very short span of time.

Kendo UI comes with three modules

• Kendo UI Web – This provides more than a dozen rich HTML5 JavaScript UI widgets like HTML editor, List View, Tree View etc with essential framework components like a powerful Data Source, touch-enabled drag-and-drop, validation, globalization, and much more.
• Kendo UI Mobile – This provides a rich application framework and HTML5 JavaScript UI widgets built specifically for solving the problems of developing mobile apps with HTML5.
• Kendo UI DataViz – This provides a dedicated suite of HTML5-powered data visualization widgets like animated charts, radial and linear gauges and area/stacked area charts etc.

Digging a bit into details Kendo UI comes with many advantages

• All the widgets are performance optimized.
• No external dependencies, except for JQuery. ll the development for Kendo UI was done ground up and the library is shipped along with the product.
• All the widgets available are quick and easy to configure with the simple and powerful API’s provided by the tool
• All major browsers are supported by the tool like FireFox, IE, and Safari, Opera, Chrome etc. The tool can also take advantage of the CSS3 hardware accelerators if the browser provides any.
• All the widgets are responsive to touch in addition to the traditional methods like mouse clicks, drag and drop etc
• Leverages reliable and quick development of applications. All the bits and pieces required to make a rich web/mobile application are available at one place, thoroughly tested, with professional support and defined roadmap.
• The widgets provided by KendoUI involve lesser risk as compared to accumulated widgets from various sources as it requires individual maintenance of each and every component used in the application with additional licensing overheads.
• In terms of applications for mobile platforms the advantage lies in the fact that you can create HTML5 and JavaScript mobile applications that automatically transform into native look and feel of iOS, Android and BlackBerry. So no efforts in replicating the same application for different mobile platforms.

Both Kendo UI and JQuery UI are JavaScript Frameworks that facilitate the development of modern web application based on JQuery with almost similar features providing Widgets, Themes, Effects, Interactions and support for browsers like IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Chrome. However Kendo UI comes with advanced features like Templates, DataSource, Model-View-ViewModel, DataVizualization, Globalization, Validation, Mobile Device Compatability justifying the commercial license. 

The market to enhane mobile platform development tools is heating up with Sencha Touch recently enabling iOS development on PC and appMobi launching public release of version 1.0 of jqMobi which is an open source HTML5 mobile app framework.

Kendo UI Web is available under Commercial or Open Source (GPLv3) licenses, making it accessible to a diverse range of projects. Kendo UI DataViz and Mobile are only available under a commercial license. A commercial license for all three Kendo UI tools can be purchased together for $699.