This Month in the Kendo UI Labs, June 2013

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…

New Projects

kendo-lint

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:

   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:

   $('#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.

kendo-ui-forms

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.

Notable Releases

• angular-kendo reaches a big milestone! (v0.5) - As Burke detailed in his blog post from earlier this week, angular-kendo has gotten some serious love from Burke and core team members Pierre and Omkar and, as a result, we have a bright and shiny 0.5 release to share. For details, be sure to check out Burke’s post and visit the GitHub repo.
• kendo-backbone gets two-way syncronization - As our resident Mr. Backbone, Derick has been giving the kendo-backbone project a lot of love, lately. Most recently, he added support for two-way sync between Backbone.Collections and the Kendo UI DataSource. He recorded a video demonstrating this feature, which you can check out here.
• knockout-kendo bumped to v0.6.2 - This release includes external pull request (PR) to fix null object bindings, and a commit from Ryan that improves KendoDataSource support in knockout-kendo.
• kendo-plugins gets a new widget - Courtesy of Jeff Valore, the kendo-plugins repo now includes an IndexedListView widget (a standard Kendo UI Mobile ListView with a right-hand index list) for Kendo UI Mobile.

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 - As Burke mentioned in his post for earlier this week, 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.
• 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. Thanks John!
• Jeff Valore - Jeff has worked on a number of Kendo UI apps for the Telerik Services team, including the Kendo UI Mobile Music Store. As a part of that project, Jeff created the custom IndexedListView widget that was recently added to the kendo-plugins repo.
• David Brotherstone - After finding an issue with null object bindings in knockout-kendo, David submitted a quick fix that Ryan quickly merged into the 0.6.1 release of the library. Thanks for the PR, David!

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!