Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI
kendoui.com
kendoui.com
1. Good documentation that doesn't just define the framework, but teaches you how to use it and get stuff done with it. Code already defines what it is, your docs should tell me why it's this way and how to use it. In Kendo UI they've got a list of dependencies for javascript projects they need, then a few code snippets with no explanation as to why or how they work.
2. Good sample code, in a full complete project you can download, with documentation on getting it up and running. Your first sample code is how everyone will write code using your project. If you've got bad samples, poor formatting, and weird file layouts (or none), then that's what everyone will write and that's what you'll be known for.
3. Examples that gradually increase in complexity. Start off with a simple hello world, graduate to a chat app or something simple, and get them to a full blown large application. In this Kendo example they've got a demo picture viewer, with no explanation for how it was built, and viewing the source it looks like a huge mess.
4. Humor. These kinds of documentation are boring as hell, especially if you're just defining everything. It doesn't have to be insanely hilarious, but at least throw a few little funny tidbits in the code. Even the great tech books of our time have tiny little jokes for the people who pay attention.
5. Finally, these frameworks rarely have a "theme". MVC is a theme. Convention over configuration is a theme. There's only one way to do it. There's more than one way to do it. Themes work to help people keep the script for why everything works the way it does in their head.
It's too bad because this looks really good, and it could be the most awesome thing on the planet. But if I can't figure it out even if I want to, then I'm never going to try.
Finally, none of what I wrote above applies if your project is for fun and not meant to be a "product".
The main problem this framework has isn't its reference-style documentation (if a framework looks good enough I'm willing to do some extra work figuring out how to use it). Kendo's real problem is its licence. Apart from seeing how "awesome" it is you can't do shit with it.
Here's the licence: http://gd.is/qDdw
Q: How is Kendo UI licensed? Is it open source?
Kendo UI is dual-licensed, Commercial and Open Source (GPLv3).
The Commercial license includes full source, professional support, access to the latest Kendo UI hotfix builds, and priority influence on the Kendo UI roadmap. During the Beta phase, the framework is licensed under a Beta license and no commercial license is available.
snippet below:
1. Grant. Telerik hereby grants to you, and you accept, a non–exclusive, non–transferable license to install and use the Software for evaluation purposes only, solely as authorized below. ....
Perhaps some good examples should be mentioned… I think, SproutCore handles points 1-3 very well (http://guides.sproutcore.com/), but lacks #5 a bit. Django's documentation seems to have most of these, too. (These aren't HTML UI frameworks, however.)
If you don't manage to get a home run with version 1.x just stick with it and fix the damn bugs, instead of doing the big rewrite, with the promise that it'll eventually work. It'll just work if you stick with it and fix the last 10%.
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http://www.kendoui.com/documentation/javascript-dependencies...
And other pages that are just enumerations of things that are in the code, then you've just defined it, you haven't told me how to use it or why it works the way it does.
Instead, they'd need docs that lead the user through step-by-step breakdowns of where things are, why they are there, how to exactly build an app from nothing, and get it working. They've got none of that. Just a .zip with some crap in it and nothing that says what to do.
Then, your idea of "sample code" is a couple of blocks of js on an HTML page? Right, I need HTML, Js, server setups, everything needed to get it working. If I don't have that then you've skipped over a ton of shared knowledge I don't have and that you need to take out of your brain and lay down so I can follow along.
"Protest too much?" You're a dick. Seriously, I love you guys who come in talking all tough like you're so damn right and really you just pedantically split hairs then throw out ad hominem attacks while claiming you abhor them.
But, then again, like I give a fuck what you think. The people who will actually benefit from my comment will read it, and the guys like you will just go about your day writing down 5 paragraphs for your docs and wondering why people can't use your crap.
http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=...
Have fun with that.
[Edit: Their web site has conflicting information in the FAQ. See below.]
[Edit: Updated link. Thanks pakitan.]
The trouble is I don't think they have a library for MVC3-ish apps with a front-end focus. At my place of work, we are ditching the traditional asp.net development and porting our app to MVC3. In the switch our Telerik .net controls were no longer usable, and we switched to jQuery UI.
I'm sure this will just end up being their solution to jQuery UI, to the corporate types that already use their current offerings.
[Edit: Updated link did work. Yeah, that license agreement is... not GPL-compatible. I'm guessing they duplicated the same boilerplate that they use for trial versions of their .NET libraries.]
The first thing I look for is a lazy-loading tree grid control (i.e. child nodes fetched on demand, reliably limited to visible row counts).
-the OP.
In the slider demo, rapidly clicking multiple times on the left or right arrow to increase/decrease the value fires a doubleclick event, highlighting most of the text on the site.
In the window demo, the mouse cursor does not change when I hover over the title bar, although the window is draggable.
It's these little details that scare me off. When I use a framework, I want it to take care of everything. If I have to add css classes for the mouse cursor or fix element positioning, I'd just build what I need myself.
To be fair, a lot of jQuery UI's development headaches come from supporting IE6, while Kendo only touts its support for IE7+...
Weird.
This one does seem to have a nice, compact, intelligible stylesheet, though – big improvement over jQuery UI there.
This is closer to ExtJS and Sencha than JQ UI.
It can be seen as flicker in Windows and there are some reports of black flashes in OS X. Switching the 3D acceleration off seems to fix them, but unfortunately it can be done only with a command line switch. We may forfeit the CSS transition animations in Chrome in later releases if we can't find a fix for these issues.
Dragging on SGS shows circular dragged object as if dragged by left top corner of bounding box.
The styles are under 70 kb combined.
How long do we have to wait before the browser can catch up? Do you think it will ever happen?
The closest thing that I've ever seen is Silverlight. With it I've been able to make some very excellent front-ends, with EASE, that look and behave identically between Mac and Windows. EDIT: The only challenge with Silverlight has been wheel-scrolling, which works fine on Windows but only works in Out-Of-Browser on the Mac.
I am doing it in my free time (at nights), because I have no funding: it is a quite huge undertaking: I am ready with 5300 lines of code, but I still need a couple of weeks just to release a very early demo. My secret aim is to make it a flash/flex killer in the long term. In the very long term:)
10 STYLING
20 LAYOUT
30 PAINTING
40 GOTO 10
At styling and layout I use dirty flag managment, so that branches of the component tree is restyled or layed out only if needed. This kind of dirty-management makes stuff a bit more complicated than otherwise, but this is a tradeoff. At painting I did not implement caching (painting to a memory buffer) and dirty flag management yet, but here I will also do optimizations in the future. This is a bit tricky, as painted components can have alpha/trasparency.
The most serious bottleneck will be probably painting (everything else can be addressed with algorithmic optimizations). At the beginning of the project I've looked at canvas painting benchmarks, and I decided canvas performance is already quite good. The slowest is drawing texts, but even that is not that terribly slow. I expect that canvas performance will improve in the browsers in the future so time works for me. Currently my samples' performance feels acceptable, although I did not do serious performance tests yet (and as I mentioned I did not implement the most agressive optimizations regarding painting yet.)
TL;DR: Making this fast is quite challenging, but not undoable I think.
To go further I will certainly need outside help (either other programmers or funding or third party component creators). I cannot create a huge component lib myself. But 10 people can do lots of things I think.
http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-upd...
Also the development side, something like the criticized old Visual Basic, an IDE where you can quickly design a rich UI with a lot of controls. It will be an irony if the best IDE for HTML5 came from Microsoft on Visual Studio >= 2012? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vp... Macromedia, Google et al have opportunities but they move slowly in this direction.
It's also strange to be developing and debugging CPython using Visual Studio http://pytools.codeplex.com/
Someone mentioned Sencha already. The other strong offering is Cappuccino.
Web apps have their own distinct style of UI that works cross-platform and has its own strengths (and weaknesses).
Trying to build web apps with UIs that try to match that of native apps is a losing proposition.
But are people willing to buy a framework like this? Or is everyone just using JQuery UI and leaving it at that?
For web apps built now, I use ExtJS. The newest release has been a little too buggy, but they are working hard to make it better.