With Google ending the long term support for AngularJS 1.x, it is time to discuss the future of AngularJS 1.x support in Kendo UI.
With Angular JS 1.x reaching its end of life on December 31, 2021, I wanted to share the news of the future plans for Kendo UI and AngularJS 1.x going forward.
Specifically, R1 2022 was the last release where the Kendo UI team added logic around the jQuery components to offer features for AngularJS 1.x, and R2 2022 will be the last release with official support for AngularJS 1.x.
This does not impact Kendo UI for Angular (2+), which will continue to be developed and follow the official Angular LTS schedule.
Continue to read for some more details about what this means for you and your teams developing with AngularJS 1.x.
With R2 2022, the Kendo UI team will officially drop support for AngularJS 1.x through Kendo UI for jQuery.
Dropping support for AngularJS 1.x means that we will no longer apply bug fixes specifically to AngularJS 1.x components, nor will we add features or new components to AngularJS 1.x. Between now and May of 2022, the team will continue to offer help through the support ticketing system for anyone still using the AngularJS 1.x components, but after R2 2022 we will no longer offer bug fixes or support for AngularJS 1.x.
This means that R1 2022 was the last release where the Kendo UI team added new components and features to our AngularJS 1.x components.
No existing projects currently using the AngularJS 1.x components will be affected with this change, and developers can continue to download versions of Kendo UI supporting AngularJS 1.x as needed.
Kendo UI for jQuery will continue to be developed with new components and features—this announcement exclusively involves AngularJS 1.x support.
For the sake of clarity I will reiterate that this does not affect Kendo UI for Angular, which has been built from the ground up for Angular 2+ and continues to serve Angular developers with new features and components with every release.
As you may or may not be aware, the integration with AngularJS 1.x that we have supported for some time comes through Kendo UI for jQuery. This has allowed us to continue to maintain AngularJS 1.x support with new components and features for several years, but with AngularJS 1.x officially getting dropped from Google’s LTS schedule, it is time for Kendo UI to do the same.
Over the last year or so, the Kendo UI team has discussed AngularJS 1.x plans with our own customers as well as the AngularJS 1.x community in general. While we know there are a few folks out there still developing with AngularJS 1.x, most have moved on to more modern libraries like Angular, React, Vue or even .NET frontend frameworks like Blazor.
With this transition in the community at large, the Kendo UI team wants to take this opportunity to focus development efforts on Kendo UI for jQuery and other JavaScript UI libraries for React, Angular and Vue. This will also help the team tackle more components, features and additional bug-fixing efforts across existing components with every release.
For teams that need to develop with AngularJS 1.x in the foreseeable future, you can still access previous versions with support for AngularJS 1.x and use them for active development in existing and future projects. These can be accessed by downloading R1 2022, or an earlier version, of Kendo UI for jQuery through the Your Account portal. These earlier versions of the Kendo UI for jQuery UI components have worked for AngularJS 1.x developers so far and will continue to do so..
Just to ensure to keep things easy to remember, I’ll highlight the two important releases below:
When AngularJS 1.x was initially released, it quickly became many developers’ go-to framework for building rich Single Page Applications. Back in those days the term “SPA” was all the rage and it seemed like a new SPA framework popped up every day. While we may not use the term as much anymore, the ideas behind these SPA frameworks lives on today in modern libraries like Angular, React, Vue, Svelte and more.
AngularJS 1.x was also Kendo UI’s first foray into officially supporting another JavaScript library outside of jQuery. The team originally based this support on our jQuery UI components and, through working with our customers and the industry at large, we learned the pros and cons of using existing UI components in order to offer support for AngularJS 1.x and similar libraries.
What we learned from this effort directly led to building native UI components for Angular, React and Vue. These teachings are something that both the Kendo UI team and our customers greatly benefit from, and it all started from the humble beginnings of adding AngularJS 1.x support.
Carl Bergenhem was the Product Manager for Kendo UI.