This Month in the Kendo UI Labs (August 2013)

Summary: In May, I introduced a new series that highlights the work happening in the Kendo UI Labs. Today, I’ll share an update for July and August, 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.

In May, I introduced a new series on the blogs, in which I spend a few moments each month highlighting all of the notable additions, releases and major happenings over at labs.kendoui.com. The 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

kendo-bootstrapper

If you were following along during the Kendo UI Q2 2013 release, you probably know that we launched a new tool, called the Kendo UI Bootstrapper, in Beta. Since the launch we, and by “we,” I mostly mean Mihai, have been hard at work on additional features, tweaks and improvements to the bootstrapper. If you’ve not yet downloaded the bootstrapper, head over to the docs to view an overview video and read the getting started guide. And, of course, since we’re sill in Beta, we’d love your feedback, issues and suggestions.

grunt-kendo-lint

Last month, we released the Kendo UI Linter, a command-line utility that checks your Kendo UI code and configuration objects for errors. The linter is built into the Kendo UI Bootstrapper, but we wanted to release this tool as a standalone utility so that it might be leveraged in other environments. One such environment is Grunt, the phenomenal JavaScript task runner. I regularly use Grunt to manage my development, test and build workflow for JavaScript apps, and I find it to be an invaluable tool. I use Grunt for development tasks like running JSHint, and having a plugin for kendo-lint seemed like a perfect fit, as well. As such, I created the grunt-kendo-lint plugin, which you can install by running npm install grunt-kendo-lint --save-dev and then defining the kendo_lint task in your gruntfile. For more information, check out the project README.

kendoui-lint.vim

If your a vim user, you’ll be happy to hear that Derick created a plugin for you to use when working with Kendo UI and the great vim editor. Derick also wrote a blog post about the plugin, including a quick overview video, so be sure to check that and the project page out to get started with the plugin.

Notable Releases

• kendo-rails updated for the Q2 2013 release! (v0.1.5) - Kendo UI dropped some new bits in July, so the kendo-rails gem got an update as well. If you’re already using the gem, just run gem update kendo-rails and you’re off.
• bower-kendo-ui updated for the Q2 2013 release! - Bower got an update, too! So if you’re using this client-side package manager for your apps, grab it with bower install kendo-ui or update your existing package with bower update kendo-ui.
• kendo-ui-forms updated with support for new HTML5 input types and the placeholder attribute (v0.1.5) - A few months ago, I announced the creation of the kendo-ui-forms polyfill, a project designed to allow you to author HTML5 Forms markup (using new input types like color, number, etc.) and automatically have those forms upgraded to use Kendo UI widgets for a great, cross-browser experience. Since the initial release, I’ve completed initial input type support and added placeholder support for oldIE and Opera Mobile. There’s more good stuff coming soon, so head over to the repo and check it out!
• angular-kendo updated with Q2 2013 bits and fixes for hg-model binding and DropDown DataSources! (v0.5.2) - Work continues on the very popular angular-kendo integrations, including a 0.5.2 release. If you’re looking to get involved with the Kendo UI Labs, this project is currently generating a TON of interest (and issues), so we’d love to have you jump in and help out!

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:

• Pierre Asselin & Omkar Patil - Nearly all of the value baked into the angular-kendo project is the result of the hard work of Pierre and Omkar, both of whom have brought their real world experience using Kendo UI and Angular together to build a really robust set of integrations. We’re grateful for their continued involvement in this project, and you should be too!
• Robin Boehm - Robin submitted a fix to the bower.json file of the angular-kendo project, which improves the Bower installation experience for that library. Thanks Robin!
• Pascal Precht - Pascal submitted a great PR to add Grunt’s conventional changelog task to our angular-kendo build process. This task enables us to turn properly-formatted commit messages into an automatically-generated changelog. Thanks Pascal!
• Jeff Ardillo - Jeff submitted a nice PR to angular-kendo to fix binding widget values when hg-model is used in Angular. Thanks Jeff!
• 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. Thanks John!
• Josh Lipford - Josh added a great new widget to the kendo-plugins repo:, a YesNoCancel dialog. Thanks Josh!

Want to add your name to the list for next time, or maybe even join our core team? We have fifteen great projects to choose from in the Labs, and we’d love to have you contribute to any of them, so jump on in!

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