This Month in the Kendo UI Labs (May 2013)

Summary: Today, we’re starting a new, monthly series that highlights notable activity in the Kendo UI Labs, including new projects, updates and key contributors.

With our Q1 2013 release, we introduced a brand new website for open-source Kendo UI extensions and integrations, the Kendo UI Labs. By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to head on over to labs.kendoui.com and check out one or more of the projects there. For an overview of the purpose of the Labs, check out my blog post from March.

Today, We’re introducing a new, monthly series on the blogs, where we’ll take a few minutes to highlight all of the notable additions, releases and major happenings over at labs.kendoui.com. Our goal is to keep you informed of the goings on over in that space, while also highlighting some of the excellent contributions coming from Kendo UI community members.

So, here we go…

New Projects

• bower-kendo-ui - If you read Burke’s excellent article on Bower earlier this week, you may already know that Kendo UI Web can now be downloaded via this popular front-end package manager. The source for our Bower package is in the Labs, so if “Bower embetterment” is your thing, look no further.
• knockout-kendo - Many of you already know about this project, started and run by our good friend, Ryan Niemeyer. Last month, Ryan agreed to transfer his project into the Kendo UI Labs so that the project could gain more visibility and attract a few more steady contributors. The project continues to be popular, so if Knockout and Kendo UI are your BFFs, we’d love to have you jump into the project and lend a hand.

Notable and Upcoming Releases

• knockout-kendo updated for the Q1 release (v0.6) - Shortly after our Q1 release, we added new bindings to knockout-kendo for the MultiSelect, ColorPicker and Tooltip widgets.
• New features in the kendo-plugins repository (v.0.0.10) - In the last few days, we’ve added a bunch of new features and enhancements to the ContextMenu plugin, as well as a custom localStorage DataSource, handy if you want to use the Kendo UI DataSource with Web Storage in the browser.
• kendo-rails updated for the Q1 release (v0.0.9) - The Kendo UI RubyGem for rails, installable via a simple gem install kendo-rails was updated with the Q1 2013 bits.
• angular-kendo - It’s not fully-baked yet, but I can’t resist sharing that our resident Angular evil geniuses are hard at work on a major rev to the angular-kendo library, and the changes should knock your socks off. If you’re one for exploring GitHub branches, you can check out the work-in-progress. Otherwise, expect to see a release from this project in a couple of weeks.

Key Contributors

Even though I, Burke and Derick do love spending as much time as we can working in the labs, we owe much of the activity in these and other projects to our first-class contributors. The following is a list of folks that have made a noticeable contribution to Kendo UI Labs projects over the last month:

• Ryan Niemeyer - Mr. KnockoutJS, as far as we’re concerned; we appreciate all Ryan does to make KnockoutJS a pleasure to use.
• John Devight - John has been doing a ton of work in the kendo-plugins repository, from cleaning up Burke’s mess, to adding features, working on docs and managing issues and pull-requests.
• Pierre Asselin - You’re going to love the changes we’re making to angular-kendo, and Pierre is a huge part of the reason why. His Angular insight and expertise has been a boon to that project.
• Josh Lipford - Josh just made some killer enhancements to the ContextMenu widget in the kendo-plugins repo. Thanks Josh, and keep ’em coming!

Want to add your name to the list for next time? We’d love to hear from you, so jump on in.

That’s all for the May update. Keep an eye on the Labs, and we’ll see you next month with more Kendo UI Labs goodies!

About the Author
Brandon Satrom (@BrandonSatrom) is Program Manager for Kendo UI and is based in Austin, TX. A unapologetic lover of the web, Brandon loves to talk about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, open source and whatever new shiny tool or technology has distracted him from that other thing he was working on. Brandon loves writing and speaking and loves hanging out with and learning from other passionate developers, both online and in person. He blogs on occasion at UserInExperience.com