
Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI - fbnt
http://www.kendoui.com
======
zedshaw
If you take away how this looks, and start digging into the project from a
beginner's perspective, this project is awful. I find this with most of the
supposed "UI frameworks" out there for HTML. With a few exceptions, they
mostly lack:

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".

~~~
sasha-dv
I agree with your points. Tutorial-style documentation is a way to go.

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>

~~~
Tautologistics
Read the FAQ, the beta version has a different license than the full release
will:

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._

------
goodside
Note: _You cannnot use this library on your web site_. The licensing agreement
forbids you from redistributing the library, whether or not it's minified. It
further states, "You are not allowed to integrate the Software into end
products or use it for any commercial or productive purpose." So private
deployment is out too. It's strictly for your own evaluation and amusement.

[http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=...](http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=436)

Have fun with that.

[Edit: Their web site has conflicting information in the FAQ. See below.]

[Edit: Updated link. Thanks pakitan.]

~~~
redidas
After poking around on their website, I noticed that this library is being
developed by Telerik (<http://www.telerik.com/>), which is a pretty big vendor
for .net libraries.

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.

~~~
TomOfTTB
It's funny because Telerik's evangelist has been pushing HTML5 hard lately
(<http://www.telerikwatch.com/>) and I found it curious because Telerik's
current offerings are useless to anyone who wants to write an HTML5 solution
on MVC (they do have a half hearted MVC project but it pales in comparison to
the free solutions available for Javascript/JQuery development)

------
kls
The question I am asking myself right now is how did this project make it to
the top slot of HN. It seems to be a re-hash of some standard frameworks, some
bad documentation, some buggy widgets and be backed by a largish vendor. I
hate to say it, but it reeks of a voting ring.

~~~
fbnt
Hey, don't shoot the messenger! I am no related whatsoever with Kendo UI, I
read about it on twitter and thought to submit it here to see what you guys
think of it. I'm pretty sure there's no voting rings involved.

-the OP.

~~~
kls
It just seemed kind of strange to me to have a pretty uneventful project hit
the top slot. I appreciate your reply and it probably just generated a lot of
conversation it just seemed unusual for HN.

------
dgreensp
Hate to jump on the negative bandwagon, but... I had a momentary hope for
something truly novel, but found the usual aggregation of data-binding
framework, templating language, and widget kit, where the widgets have various
bugs/quirks that make them undesirable to use as is.

------
trb
Using Chrome13 on Ubuntu, when I try to use the Drag&Drop Demo, the draggable
element jumps to the lower right corner of the mouse cursor.

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.

~~~
danellis
Even worse, on Chrome on Mac the entire page flashes black for a fraction of a
second every time you select something from a drop-down list. Unusable.

------
TrevorBurnham
I'd seriously consider using this, just because of the stagnancy of jQuery UI.
It's a massive project with hundreds of long-open tickets (despite thousands
of dollars spent on incentivizing developers over the summer through
<http://rewardjs.com/>). 1.8 was released in March of 2010, and the last
milestone release for 1.9 was back in May.

To be fair, a lot of jQuery UI's development headaches come from supporting
IE6, while Kendo only touts its support for IE7+...

~~~
cshenoy
There seems to be some inconsistencies across the site including support for
IE6. The demo page (<http://demos.kendoui.com/>) says it does while the
overview page (<http://www.kendoui.com/kendo-ui.aspx>) says IE7+.

Weird.

------
forgotusername
Demo pages are completely broken for keyboard navigation (try tabbing or
activating the accordion widget). Wake me up when the hard stuff is actually
working (accessibility!)

------
stoph
I'm having a hard time nailing down what the killer features are here. For
example, I saw that they advertise drag-and-drop with support for touch
devices, but I couldn't even find the drag and drop demo on the site.

~~~
jwarzech
Here is a link to their drag and drop demo
<http://demos.kendoui.com/datasource/index.html>

~~~
stoph
Thanks. I'll be checking this out, although I was hoping they would also have
something equivalent to jQuery's Sortable
(<http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/>).

------
sunchild
I've learned from experience to run away from these kinds of UI kits. I always
end up hacking around their shortcomings (e.g., tokenized inputs with
autocomplete, etc.)

This one does seem to have a nice, compact, intelligible stylesheet, though –
big improvement over jQuery UI there.

------
dillon
I couldn't say if jQuery UI is better or this is better, honestly seems they
are just different. Even if Kendo UI is faster I have never had a speed issue
with jQuery UI (not speaking for everyone, just, I personally have never had a
speed issue).

~~~
chime
The UI Widgets seem quite nice and well-designed:
<http://demos.kendoui.com/combobox/remotedatasource.html>

This is closer to ExtJS and Sencha than JQ UI.

------
pbreit
The problem I have with this and JQueryUI is that both are still too stylized
such that they don't lend themselves well to being integrated into an existing
design. And the JqueryUI themeroller doesn't help much. YUI probably does the
best job of being generic enough to utilize broadly.

------
youngtaff
Let's hope the code produced by the controls is better than the code Telerik's
CMS generates...

------
notb
For some reason, in Chrome 13 on OS X, some of the UI animations cause the
browser view to go black for a second and redraw. Not sure if this is just a
Chrome bug but it's really obnoxious and means I won't use it until it's
smoother.

~~~
bundyo
Since we are doing the animations with CSS transitions when available, we are
affected by several bugs in Chrome's 3D CSS transitions (mainly when switching
into and out of composited mode):
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437>
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126>

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.

------
twog
We arent far away from being able to copy and paste beautiful front-end
designs.

~~~
georgemcbay
Technology to simply create beautiful designs using copy&paste/drag&drop is
about 2 years off... just as it has been for the past 20 years.

------
scotty79
Aeroviewr button borders look ugly in Chrome and on Samsung Galaxy S also
arrow on play button is of center.

Dragging on SGS shows circular dragged object as if dragged by left top corner
of bounding box.

------
ereckers
This is a bit off the topic of your actual framework, but as far as branding,
I love your logo. Do you mind sharing the person/company that designed it for
you?

------
sgt
It looks pretty good. Good UX and well designed, and I see that it's based on
jQuery. That's useful for many reasons, e.g. you can least pull jQuery from a
CDN.

~~~
gyoshev
by the way, all kendo scripts are also hosted on CDN

------
ayanb
Has anybody downloaded this yet? I see three css files and one minified js.
What is the total size of all three of these?

~~~
burkeholland
The .js file is coming in at 233.85 kb when pulled from the CDN, but that's
the whole framework. I think it's highly likely that they will create a
modular packaging system so you can get just what you need.

The styles are under 70 kb combined.

------
secoif
I'm always put off when a framework doesn't get straight down to the
code/usage examples. Down with meta bloat.

------
snorkel
Nice but decent upload widgets these days include support for drop-zone
uploading.

~~~
bundyo
There is a drop zone if supported by the browser. Try dropping a file here:
<http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html> in Chrome or Firefox.

------
WayneDB
I apologize in advance if this opinion offends anyone, but every HTML UI kit
that I've seen simply can't hold a candle to native kits such as WinForms, WPF
or even Cocoa. I would really love a write-once browser based solution, but I
just can't see that type of solution ever catching up to native tech.

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.

~~~
nadam
I am working on a UI lib which is written in Javascript and completely painted
on HTML5 canvas. I know, crazy idea... I got rid of the incompatibilities of
the browsers, I got rid of DOM: I defined my own event system, component
graph, etc... This will be someting like a traditional desktop component based
UI, just in javascript, in the browser. Styling will be far more advanced than
CSS: you can even inject a custom paint method into a component from a
stylesheet. (stylesheets will be javascript classes). Also it will have
advanced dynamic layout. (min/max/preferred sizes, weights, gridpanel with
colspan, rowspan, etc...)

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:)

~~~
roel_v
Why don't you just write a Canvas backend for an existing toolkit like gtk or
qt? You'll never be able to implement all the details of a sufficiently wide
range of controls on a one-man (or even 10) part time basis.

~~~
nadam
The biggest fun of the project was that I was completely free to design the
system from the ground up (except the canvas drawing functions). Regarding the
amount of work I have to be strategical. I try to concentrate on a relatively
small core system: get the philosophy right, tune the performance as much as
possible. The components which are 'ready' right now: Window, Button,
ScrollBar, ScrollPanel, GridPanel, TextEditor, StaticDoc. (StaticDoc is a
read-only RichText component, kind of the original HTML.) The other absolute
necessary things needed in the near future: TabPanel, DataTable, CheckBox,
ComboBox.

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.

------
lean
Seems like an obvious FAQ would be, "How does this compare to jQuery UI?".

~~~
TrevorBurnham
It appears to be more oriented toward enterprises, who'd be happy to license
this just for internal web apps. You've got Grid and Chart widgets (must-haves
for internal sites that show business data), but no Datepicker (a must-have
for consumer-facing sites).

~~~
bundyo
A Datepicker is currently being worked on.

~~~
TrevorBurnham
Good to know. I've gotta say, the jQuery UI Datepicker is just perfect. If I
use jQuery UI on a site, it's almost certainly just for the Datepicker.

------
wavephorm
It actually looks pretty good and would save you a ton of time rather than
trying to build some of these widgets yourself.

But are people willing to buy a framework like this? Or is everyone just using
JQuery UI and leaving it at that?

------
alphadogg
Needs a lot more baking.

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.

