Announcing the Kendo UI Q1 2013 Roadmap!

Kendo UI’s Q3 release is behind us, and the holidays are upon us. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with a roadmap update!

And I’m not talking about just any roadmap, it’s the Kendo UI Q1 2013 roadmap. Consider it an early Christmas present from us, to you.

What makes a roadmap?

Before I dive into the details of the Q1 roadmap, I thought it might be helpful to set the stage with a little background on how we arrive at our roadmap, in the first place. UserVoice is our public forum for customer feedback, of course, but the data contained therein is only one piece of a much larger puzzle to fit together when it comes time to plan for a release. When planning, we gather all of your feedback from UserVoice, as well as relevant data from these sources:

• Industry research and analysis
• Direct Customer surveys and feedback
• Forum and support requests
• Input from Telerik leadership

With all of this data in hand (and there is a lot of it!) the team gathers to prioritize all relevant requests, create a roadmap for the next few quarters, and establish themes for the current release. Themes categorize much of our focus, while also clearly defining the value we plan to deliver to customers in a given release. Though each release of Kendo UI is full of new features and fixes in our Web, DataViz or Mobile suites, we feel that it’s important to focus our release planning around broad themes that represent the “big rocks” of value we want to provide. Many of these themes align to a single suite, while others affect the framework as a whole. Our key release themes for Kendo UI in Q1 will be:

Server Wrappers for Java and PHP

For our Q3 release, we introduced the beta of Kendo UI Complete for JSP, a set of server wrappers for Java JSP developers. We’re in the process of collecting feedback for our Java Wrappers (and if you’re using our wrappers, please let us know what you think), and are planning to officially deliver them with the Q1 release.

Along with wrappers for Java, I’m excited to announce that Q1 will also mark the delivery of server wrappers for PHP developers! I know that many of you have been patiently waiting for these, and I’m happy to report that the wait will soon be over. Stay tuned for a preview of these with the Beta early next year.

Support for Modern JavaScript Apps

In addition to our server wrappers, we plan to use time in Q1 to address some of the biggest features you’ve been asking for related to the construction of large-scale, modern JavaScript applications. For starters, we’ll be adding support for RequireJS, so if you’re an RJS fan, you’ll be able to easily leverage Kendo UI in your apps.

The other request we get quite often is support for building “Single Page Applications” or SPAs. SPAs are a huge topic, and while there’s nothing stopping you from building SPAs and using Kendo UI in your own apps today, we know that several customers would like to see Kendo deliver full-stack “SPA support,” which we feel means:

• View Management
• Routing
• Client Data Support and Syncing

For Q1, our plan is to deliver an Alpha of a SPA sample implementation. Since SPA is a big topic, and there are lots of directions we can go with this, we’d like to get something in your hands, and gather your feedback before delivering a finalized feature set in a future quarter.

New Chart Types in Kendo UI DataViz

Hot on the heels of the Stock Chart type we added to Kendo UI DataViz in Q3, we’ll be adding some additional charts in Q1, including Sparklines, BulletGraphs and DataBars. We’ll also be dropping in some additional features and interactivity across all chart types, so keep an eye out for our Service Pack and Beta releases early next year!

Windows Phone 8 Support in Kendo UI Mobile

The last major theme is one that I know many of you have been waiting for, and it’s one we’re excited to finally be able to deliver. In Q1, we’ll be adding Windows Phone 8 to our list of target platforms for Kendo UI Mobile. As we’ve said in the past the hurdle for Windows Phone has always been the capabilities of the browser. IE9 on WP7 and 7.5 was missing a lot of critical features we needed to bring Kendo UI Mobile to those devices. With the introduction of IE10 on Windows Phone 8, that hurdle has been cleared and we’re excited to be able to give you the ability to target WP8 with your Kendo UI Mobile applications! We’ll be posting more detail about WP8 support soon, so stay tuned!

The items above are some of our “big rocks” for Q1, but there’s a lot more we’re working on. In addition to these themes, you can expect that we’ll deliver a number of other requested widgets, features and enhancements for Q1 (including new web widgets like multi-select, color picker and tooltip, and ListView search mode in Kendo UI Mobile). For more information about additional features we plan to deliver, head on over to the Roadmap page on KendoUI.com.

The Kendo UI roadmap is a living document. Even though we’re focusing our efforts around the themes I shared here today, we’re always looking to deliver maximum value to our customers with each release. With that in mind, you should consider the public roadmap published at KendoUI.com to be a living document, as well. There’s always a chance that other key and requested features will find their way into our Q1 release, so keep an eye on that space over the coming months.

And as always, we want your feedback! If you’re interested in weighing in on the roadmap moving forward, head on over to our public UserVoice forum to view, comment and vote on ideas, or even add your own. We watch this forum regularly, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see in a future release!

Our three 2012 releases were jam-packed with a ton of new features and fixes, but there’s still plenty to be done! Thanks to your feedback, the team has arrived at a roadmap that will make our Q1 release next year even more exciting! Stay tuned as we work to make the best toolkit for building applications with HTML, JavaScript and CSS even better.

Finally, Happy Holidays everyone!

Links

• Main Roadmap Page
• Kendo UI Web Roadmap
• Kendo UI DataViz Roadmap
• Kendo UI Mobile Roadmap