Telerik, a leading provider of developer tools and solutions announced a major update to its product Kendo UI. It has released the Kendo UI Complete with several new features, like support for tablet U and server-side wrappers for ASP.NET MVC. This enhancement has been created to enable developers to quickly build rich, native-like, and simplify development of HTML5 and JavaScript mobile apps and sites.

Recently, I spoke with Telerik’s Vice President of HTML5 Web and Mobile Tools, Todd Anglin about the state of HTML5 in the industry and how Kendo will change how developers approach it in a fashion that permits them to enable a sort of one-size-fits-all with the capabilities of a tailored fit.

As developers are quickly turning to HTML5 for the array of features and benefits it offers, Telerik has already incorporated adaptive rendering capabilities in Kendo UI to leverage the latest in CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript web standards, in order to adapt a mobile app’s native appearance on any smartphone or tablet, especially iPad, and provide support for all major browsers. With this update, developers can use these capabilities to target multiple phone and tablet platforms with a single UI codebase. Of course, this will eliminate challenge of manually researching and combining plug-ins, frameworks, and libraries needed to build mobile apps. Also, this release adds a complete set of controls and widgets for creating rich iPad user interfaces.

HTML5 and Kendo UI Tailored-Fit to Ease Fractured Mobile Development Woes

Anglin explained that the massive appeal of the Kendo UI will be precisely in the capability for developers to write native-looking apps for the mobile OS they’re aiming for without having to modify their code each time they compile for a different device. As such, they can write their application so that it will obtain the look-and-feel of an iOS device or an Android device when it’s loaded instead of having to produce separate products for each of those platforms.

It’s also possible for developers to write applications that take advantage of OS-native API calls by using wrappers for the different OSes (should they desire a more intimate approach) but with HTML5 it greatly increases the time-to-market for apps that don’t need to worry about the subtleties of the target platform. To Anglin this is one of the major issues facing mobile developers today with a market including iOS, Android, Blackberry, and even Windows Phone 7.

Being able to write-once, display-anywhere is a big deal with a market of multiple devices; adding on the capability to write one app–that can be distributed immediately across app stores—and have that app take on the UI look-and-feel of the target device at load will take a lot of strain off the UI development portion of application writing.

As a result, a product like Kendo UI will allow developers to get down to what they do best: producing a solid, reliable and innovative app for mobile users to engage with.

[Contributing authors: Isha Suri and Kyt Dotson]