Summary: Last month, I introduced a new series that highlights the work happening in the Kendo UI Labs. Today, I’ll share an update for June, 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.
Last month, 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…
One of the things that can be tough about working with JavaScript is the lack of design-time or static analysis of one’s code. A lot of times, this means that we don’t discover basic syntax errors until we’re running that code in the browser. Static analysis tools like JSLint and JSHint have become popular because they can automatically check our code for basic syntax or style guide violations at design or build time. For a while now, we’ve been thinking about how we can extend this concept to Kendo UI. Specifically, we wanted to build a linking tool that would perform static analysis specifically against your Kendo UI code, both procedural JS code and configuration objects and declarative options in your HTML. The result is kendo-lint a Nodejs package from Mihai Bazon that you can install quickly via npm:
kendo-lint
npm install -g kendo-lint
Once you’ve installed the package, you can run it against any snippet of JS or against existing js and html files in your app. For instance, let’s say I have a script file called badKendo.js with the following code:
js
html
badKendo.js
$('#foo').kendoNumericTextBox({ min: 1, max: 200, stepUp2TheStreets: 5 // Bad Config Option });
When I call kendo-lint with this file, like so
kendo-lint js/badKendo.js
I get the following pack from the library:
js/badKendo.js[4,1]: Option stepUp2TheStreets not found
Pretty sweet, huh? Now, instead of hunting around for errors in those large configuration objects, you can call upon kendo-lint for help! Of course, libraries like this work best inside of build systems, so we’re also working on a Grunt plugin that will allow you to use kendo-lint alongside of jshint in your build process.
Grunt
jshint
In what little spare time I have, I’ve been working on an HTML5 Forms polyfill that uses Kendo UI Web widgets and framework features (like validation) to “fill in the gaps” for browsers that don’t support one or more of the new specified form types, attributes and features. The goal is to enable you to mark up a form using these new types (color, datetime, etc) and features, call $('#myForm').kendoForm() and get Kendo UI widgets wherever those types are used. For more information about the project, it’s roadmap and to get started, head on over to the project repository in the Labs.
$('#myForm').kendoForm()
angular-kendo
kendo-backbone
knockout-kendo
IndexedListView
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:
We’ve been so impressed by all of the hard work from our Labs Core Team (Pierre, Okmar, Ryan and John) that we decided to create special Kendo UI Labs t-shirts just for them. So if you see any of these guys out in the wild sporting the design below, be sure to thank them for all of their hard work on the Kendo UI Labs!
Want to add your name to the list for next time, or maybe even join our core team? We have thirteen great projects to choose from in the Labs, and we’d love to have you work on any of them, so jump on it!
That’s all for the June update. Keep an eye on the Labs, and we’ll see you next month with more Kendo UI Labs goodies!
Brandon is the founder of Carrot Pants Press, a maker education and publishing company, the founder and CEO of Tangible Labs and an avid tinkerer.
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