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Telerik is known for having a publicly available Kendo UI roadmap for each major release since it was launched in November 2011. This provides transparency and ensures new functionality is aligned with the expectations and preferences of our most valuable stakeholders—our customers. As Q2’14 is already history, it’s again time to look ahead and reveal what “new elements” for web and mobile apps are developing in our labs.

How a Roadmap is Born

After each Q milestone, our product strategy, product management and engineering leads gather internally and discuss, prioritize and schedule new Kendo UI features and building blocks for the next four months, based on:

  • Industry research and analysis
  • Direct customer surveys and feedback (including our UserVoice portal) 
  • Forum posts and support requests
  • Input from Telerik leadership

As you can see, your feedback is instrumental helping in to determine and prioritize which functionality we develop, so we focus on what will bring the most value to web and mobile developers as you use Kendo UI tools. After all this data is analyzed, mapped and correlated, the roadmap is shaped in its final form and published on our site.

Now that you know about our roadmap planning process, let’s have a quick look at the focal points for Q3 2014:

Offline Data and Export for Your Professional Business Apps

HTML5 has won the hearts and minds of developers around the globe. Organizations, regardless of their size, understand that adoption and utilization of HTML5 is essential for future success as well as to excel in the rapidly transforming web space targeting desktop and mobile devices of diverse platforms and sizes. Striving to deliver the same rich experience for both businesses and consumers, developers are looking into ways to support scenarios with offline or occasionally-connected apps. This also applies to client export functionality which enables business users to “take the data and run.”

To that end, the next Kendo UI release will be squared on new functionality solving these pain points.

Offline Data Support (Core)

Kendo UI DataSource is an integral part of web and mobile apps when it comes to feeding UI with data from local or remote storage, as well as editing or tracking the state of data models. On top of that, it also provides abstractions for executing sorting, paging or filtering queries against this data, virtually saving you the hassle of coding these operations manually. So, What happens when the remote data endpoint is not available?

Your application should continue to work regardless whether it’s in a disconnected or occasionally-connected state. By adding offline support to the DataSource, these scenarios will be automatically covered by saving the data locally while offline, then synchronizing the changes when your connection resumes. Bottom line, you don’t need to worry about data whether your apps are disconnected or not, the DataSource will have that covered for you.

But wait, it gets even better! This feature is incorporated as part of the service pack release which landed this week, and you can see it here in action.

DataSource_offline_support

Since the DataSource is part of our Kendo UI Core offering, it’s immediately available for our OS users also.

Export

When developing line-of-business applications, it’s a common requirement to export the visualized data from your application to share it with management or colleagues who don’t have direct access to the app, or who want to later process the data further in MS Excel. In the next major Kendo UI version, we’ll provide a solution to these cases by integrating client export capabilities (to Excel and PDF, where applicable) for our professional widgets, i.e. grid, chart, gauge, scheduler, gantt, editor, pivot grid and diagram. Thus, you’ll be able to easily export their content to PDF or Excel on the client, and it’s as simple as having no dependencies on server backend or server-side export processing engine.

TreeList Widget (Professional)

A brand new widget providing a powerful combination of grid and treeview widget features (also popular with the name TreeGrid). It will visualize a hierarchical treeview-like representation coupled with data columns with sorting, filtering and data editing capabilities. It’s useful when you want to display and operate with self-referencing hierarchy structures.

TreeList

iOS8 and Android L compatibility + Theme (Core)

Our goal is to support the new version of Android with its so-called Material design, and implement Kendo UI Theme for all widgets in accordance with these design principles. The Kendo UI iOS support for mobile widgets will also be updated to support features and designs introduced with iOS8. New mobile UX trends are coming, and Kendo UI tools will stay on top of them as usual!

The official versions of iOS8 and Android L are expected to be released by Apple and Google sometime this autumn.

Improved AngularJS Support for Mobile Widgets (Core)

With the introduction of official AngularJS integration and support for the Kendo UI framework in Q2, we received very positive feedback and comments from our users. It’s great to know that we are on the right track. To strengthen these integrations even further, we’ll be including support for mobile application view transitions and layouts for our mobile widgets in Q3 2014. Thus, you’ll have a slicker user experience when using them side-by-side with AngularJS in your apps.

PivotGrid RTM (Professional)

Debuting as Beta in Q2’14, the PivotGrid widget will mature and move into RTM stage for Q3, adding the following functionality to further facilitate your work when operating with multi-dimensional data:

  • Support for KPIs
  • Templates
  • Sorting
  • Extended API
  • More styling customizations
This will empower you with more key features and API hooks to output and manipulate your OLAP data via its UI representation.

Drawing Engine Utilization for All Dataviz Widgets (Professional)

IIn Q2, we laid the foundation of our DataViz drawing engine API that gives you access to the same programmatic API used internally by our widgets for rendering. During this process, we made some improvements in the rendering engine itself, and for the next Kendo UI milestone, our charts will take advantage of these enhancements. This will open the path for additional charting customizations and features, as well as bring performance improvements to all DataViz widgets.

New Widget Features

As usual, there will be many new features for the existing Kendo UI widgets, but here I’ll try to mention the most notable of them:
  • Grid – multi-column headers, save/restore settings (Professional)
  • Scheduler – Timeline view (Professional)
  • Diagram – Data Editing/CRUD support (Professional)
  • DataSource – OData v4 support (Core)
  • Gantt – Resources and Advanced Edit Form (Professional)
  • Gauge – support for multiple pointers (Professional)
  • HTML helpers for checkbox and radio buttons + styles (ASP.NET MVC wrappers)

Is That All?

This list is by no means comprehensive, nor does it aim to cover everything that’ll be included in Kendo UI Q3 2014. I tried to cover the most important items from my perspective here, and for the complete list of features please refer to the official roadmap page.

Your Feedback Matters

As a client-driven company, your feedback plays a key role in planning the development direction for Kendo UI. Hence, I’m happy to hear your opinion on our roadmap, sharing it in the comments section below.

If you have any suggestions or feature requests, head over to our Feedback portal and share them where they can be discussed and voted on by the community.

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stefan-rahnev

About the author
Stefan Rahnev (@StDiR) is Product Manager for Telerik Kendo UI living in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has been working for the company since 2005, when he started out as a regular support officer. His next steps at Telerik took him through the positions of Technical Support Director, co-team leader in one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams and unit manager for UI for ASP.NET AJAX and Kendo UI. Stefan’s main interests are web development, agile processes planning and management, client services and psychology.


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