Introducing the Kendo UI Labs

Summary: Last week in our Spring 2013 launch event, we announced a brand new website for open-source Kendo UI extensions and integrations. In this post, I’ll share a bit more about the site, which you can check out for yourself at labs.kendoui.com.

“Everything you need…”

Kendo UI prides itself on being “everything you need” to build rich web and mobile sites and applications using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. This has been something of a guiding principle to us over the past few years, and is something we pay close attention to with each and every release of our products.

That said, we recognize that the web development landscape is changing and evolving, and daily, at that. Web developers are being asked to build complex and sophisticated applications that push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web, and in exciting ways. Kendo UI continues to be a firm foundation upon which these types of apps can be built, but we know that developers are, increasingly, bringing complementary libraries together as they build these modern apps.

Putting it another way, even though Kendo UI strives to be everything you need, it may not be the only thing you use in your day-to-day development.

“…plus the libraries you want.”

Maybe you prefer to use Kendo UI with Knockout, AngularJS or Backbone. Maybe you need a widget that’s mostly like the Kendo UI Autocomplete, but with a few tweaks to the functionality. Even though most 3rd party libraries play just fine with Kendo UI, you might find yourself wishing for more, be it a custom DataSource for Breeze.js, or a Kendo UI Widget that combines the Kendo UI ListView with a YouTube search for Harlem Shake Videos, which is something Burke Holland has been requesting for a while now.

Over the last several months, we’ve gotten a lot of requests from you to make integrations with some of these third party libraries part of the official Kendo UI project. We definitely hear you, loud and clear!

Introducing the Kendo UI Labs

So, while we’re not planning to add integrations and support for these libraries as officially-supported parts of Kendo UI, we thought we could do one better than just saying no. To that end, we’ve created Kendo UI Labs, and place where the Kendo UI team and you, the developer community, can work to create these types of integrations together.

At this very moment, the Kendo UI Labs are live in the form of a brand new GitHub organization. In this organization, you’ll find myriad sample repositories and integration libraries that we hope will provide useful as you build cutting-edge apps with Kendo UI.

We have big plans for the Kendo UI labs, and we’ve launched with nine projects, including starter integrations for AngularJS, Backbone and Breeze, with more to come in the future. To see the complete list, download the latest release or visit the GitHub repository directly, head on over to the labs and look for the fancy table with all of the relevant project details.

Give Us Your Codez!

Before I wrap up this post, I want to underscore that the Kendo UI Labs are a community effort. Though you’ll find members of the Kendo UI team working on these projects, we want to work with you, as well. That means we want your issues, ideas and pull requests. So, I encourage you head on over to labs.kendoui.com, and find a project that interests you. A few of our projects have already gotten a lot of watchers and even a few contributors, and we’d love to see your contributions too! Each project has a detailed contribution guide (here’s the guide for the angular-kendo project, for instance), and this guide is quite similar from one project to the next, so there’s no reason you can’t jump right on in, today!

We hope you find the Kendo UI Labs a helpful resource as you’re building modern web apps. If there’s every anything we can do to make them better, don’t hesitate to drop us a line and let us know.

Links

• Kendo UI Labs
• Labs GitHub Organization