I know there is pricing for using Kendo UI. But in other hands, kendo provides CDN service to use kendo WIDGET. So I am confused that If it is providing service then why it has the price for it.
Take a look at their github page. They are releasing part of their UI using the Apache v2.0 License, which, as it is a permissive open-source license, indicates that you can in fact use some, but not all of their features for a commercial project without having to pay.
The kendo 'Core' code can thus be used for any purpose you see fit and they're not able to exercise copyright to stop you, provided you fulfil the terms of the Apache license.
Alternatively, if you buy a professional license from them, you are also allowed to use the full range of UI features. Of course you can't redistribute, Kendo holds the copyrights to e.g. its grid feature. That being said, any code and content you create and present using the UI will by default have all its rights reserved by you.
And a third alternative is to use their CDN. As you noted, usage of the CDN is essentially free; it comes with the caveat that a user also sends a page view to their site. The big caveat is that Telerik is free to add in far more restrictions than with its other two products, where by their very nature such restrictions are impossible to create. As Telerik provides code, the programmer could remove advertisement or spying by modifying it. Not so much when you use the CDN: the code behind it could be closed. A cursory look at their terms of use indicates that they do add some potentially nasty restrictions, including, but not limited to:
Claiming copyright over data presented using their CDN.
This is a pretty large restriction. You're essentially giving away the rights to whatever creative thing you make using their CDN for at least 120 years.
Restricting content available. Especially the third rule (quote):
is threatening, tortious, defamatory, libelous, indecent, obscene, pornographic, invasive of another’s privacy, or promotes violence; or
These are subjective terms, so Telerik is free to censor your data to a surprising degree if it is in its interests. A bit further down the terms, there's this line, making the full extent of what Telerik can do pretty clear;
Telerik reserves the right, in its sole and absolute discretion for any reason or no reason, to remove or modify any Content, or any other element of the Sites or the Services, without notice or permission from you.
Include hidden anticompetitive clauses. E.g. you can't use Kendo's UI CDN to make a site about your own UI. Although this is somewhat small of an issue: you obviously would want to use your own UI to advertise itself!
Related
If a question seeking product recommendations is not deemed 'right', please feel free to lock/delete this post. I will seek other avenues.
The presentation layer of enterprise applications has hardly ever been my focus area. However now, I am required to look for a development platform that allows quick and easy development of dashboards with widgets. Where, development is no more than drag-drop and few clickys here and there. This is because the audience is more of business oriented folks than development staff.
After much browsing around, I think, I have short-listed the requirements of a development platform suitable for us.
Custom display elements. I should be able to import display elements (line chart, bar graph, etc.) or develop on my own.
Event-based refresh. All the display elements should have an option to refresh itself based on events than on a refresh time period.
Responsive. The display elements should render correctly on different browsers on devices of different aspect ratio e.g. laptop, desktop, 42" LED TV, etc.
Internationalization support. All display text and locale elements (date, money, etc.) should be rendered via a 'bundle' or at least be programmable for me.
Hand-held friendly. The platform maybe provides a SDK that allows handling of device gestures for rendering display. For example, pinch to zoom, swipe, etc.
Ideally, an open source product backed by commercial support would be great.
Most options that I have seen, do not have an easy drag-drop feature. For example, d3.js has some really amazing visualizations but, probably requires non-trivial development effort. I checked out Freeboard too, but, I am not sure if it can extend to custom data sources and widgets. Splunk looks good but I am not sure how extensible it is.
So, what are your suggestions?
I would highly recommend Splunk for your case. I have been working with it for quite a while now and have seen numerous capabilities. It is not true that it is not responsive; most companies demonstrate Splunk dashboards on wide screens, projectors, mobile phones, etc.
Using custom display elements couldn't be easier. There is a variety of options of charts,graphs,stats tables and others,plus you can work with various programming language from simple xml and html to javascript (d3 libraries are supported for D3 visualizations) for more complex applications. You can add drilldowns to your panels, time pickers, search boxes, all by using its GUI interface.
You can easily configure it to "auto-run" when new events are available by choosing one of the real time options , e.g. 1-minute-window, 5-minute-window,etc.
You will be impressed how easy is to "form" your data, as Splunk recognises and extracts timestamps and time zone data automatically (of course you can apply your own settings in any case). It is also capable of recognising different data sources (like json, syslog, database logs, etc) providing the proper configurations for line breaking, fields extractions, and other options, allowing regex replacement too.
Imho it is the easiest and most robust way to visualise your data quickly allowing a lot of space for customizations.
Many big website (google.com, apple.com, microsoft.com) are never validated. When the big shots don't do it, is there a reason why others should?
w3.org provide a page dedicated to people asking just that question, it's here.
Of course places like Google and Microsoft are there to appeal and should all be consistent across browsers. The w3 does have some good points
Using standard, interoperable markup and stylesheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one's page handled consistently across platforms and user-agents. Indeed, most developers creating rich Web applications know that reliable scripting needs the document to be parsed by User-Agents without any unexpected error, and will make sure that their markup and CSS is validated before creating a rich interactive layer.
When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.
Another very important point is maintenance. A strictly valid XHTML document as much easier to maintain than a bowl full of HTML tag soup. Trust me.
We must remember that the markup is there as a data format. The way a browser renders this markup is what's generally important to a user.
Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?
They are probably validated, but need to support older browsers (like IE6), so comptability-code is added.
Just because someone else doesn't, doesn't mean it's not a good thing. When you validate, you not only find out if your pages are well-formed, but you also track down bugs in your code, make the web pages easier to maintain and your code is more likely to work cross browser as well with future browsers. In addition to this, it shows that you take your job serious and that you have a good habit of trying to generate quality code.
Staying strictly within a known range of syntax (or technologies, in general) is good for optimizing maintenance costs, because all technologies you depend on (browsers in this case) are very well tested for the standard-conforming cases (subset of HTML/CSS/JS) only and are only randomly tested beyond.
We are currently an Infragistics NetAdvantage Select customer and have been for a few years. Their controls are ok but not what I would call great but the time invested in learning them to date is the main reason we stick with them. We use both ASP.NET and Winnform controls.
As we are due to renew, we are considering DevExpress as an option as they seem to offer much of the same functionality.
For anyone that has made this move fro mInfragistics to DevExpress, how have you found it? A step forward or back? Pros and Cons to doing so?
My company is using DevExpress and we are very satisfied with their suite. We have never used the Infragistics suite, so I can't talk about the process to switch from Infragistics to DevExpress.
Generally, I find the DevExpress controls very easy to use and implement in our applications. Some controls have a small learning curve like the DevExpress TreeList but it is not a huge issue.
One thing I dont like with some of their controls is the property "Properties". This property is used to set additional options to the control.
Per example to set the max length of a textedit (textbox of devexpress) :
textEdit.Properties.MaxLength instead of textEdit.MaxLength
So, their controls are great and have a great look but I think the main quality of DevExpress is their support. You can ask a question on the support page and you will receive a answer within one day, maybe two days if the question is complex.
So, if you are not statisfied with Infragistics, try DevExpress. You can download a trial version so you have nothing to lose.
I will second that you should give Telerik a look. Their support is top notch in the industry. They give you good real world examples and their documention I feel is second to none.
I took on a contract with a company entrenched in the controls you're considering and I wouldn't use them if they were free.
The reasons I make this statement is their documentation in my opinion was bad. When I spend money on a RAD type control suite, it's to make my work easier and faster to production. I found in some cases it was easier to just figure out how to make built-in controls do what you want versus trying to figure out the problems I was having with their controls.
Their samples are kind of like Microsoft samples used to be. They are fluff based for Tech sales to show at a seminar "how easy something is to setup" but in real world if you used the techniques and monitored viewstate and traffic their examples generated, you'd be less than impressed.
I didn't have an account to submit support tickets but I had 4 over the course of a month submitted through the account holder and to my knowledge didn't get an answer back on any of them. (That could have been a break down with the person I had to go through but I doubt it.)
When it comes to Telerik's, Rad controls for Ajax, very seldom I can't figure out what I need to do by either looking at the sample Visual Studio sample web solution that get's installed combined with their documentation.
Good luck in your search and even if you don't consider Telerik, I would strongly suggest you look for other options.
Slightly unrelated but you might also want to evaluate the Telerik controls. We have been using them for years. Exceptional controls and support. And their controls work with ASP.NET MVC as well.
Just a happy customer here.
Not related to controls, but with DevExpress suite you get superb VS addins for free - CodeRush and RefactorPro.
Like Francis, I haven't made the move from infragistics to devexpress, I started with devexpress. I can speak to the learning curve. Depending on the controls you're going to use, and how you intend to use them, there can be very little learning curve.
The data manipulation controls (xtragrid, xtrascheduler, xtracharts, etc.) are extremely easy to use when binding to a database. Less so when binding to persistent objects. Their XPO, oddly enough, isn't as easy/intuitive as it could or should be when databinding though also not incredibly hard.
The major benefit for me was documentation. Their documentation site as well as their tutorial videos are top notch and really get to the point without using trivial, nor overly-complex examples.
As Francis said, the response time on tickets, and the (usual) clarity and detail of the replies - they often include small projects showing what you're supposed to do, or will alter your project that you submit with a ticket - is second to none imo.
Moving from Infragistics to Devexpress is tough! I have been using Infragistics for past 2 years as a Windows and a Web developer and now I am using Devexpress at a different place.
It is slightly difficult for the developer to use the Devexpress control due to its versatile properties. If you take a example of grid in DevExpress (in case of Windows) there are 2 parts:
The main display part and
The view part so you can manage them during the binding
On the other hand there was no such thing in Infragistics, so it was plain and simple to use.
Similarly there are lot of such difference between Infragistics and Devexpress controls.
Now What I feel is if you are interested in having some complex functionality with lot of tedious logic then Devexpress is good for you! Or if you want to keep the things simple with decent functionality then Infragistics is good for you.
So as you know it is very difficult to tell which one of these is really superior - we have to choose them based on our own requirements.
Stick to Developers Express. They have much better upgrade path and almost all breaking changes are in written.
I have been using them since 2003 and still ahven't found a better match.
I migrated from Infragistics to DevExpress. Will never go back to Infragistics as their objects are much heavier and performance is not too great. Documentation is terrible and their examples are very juevenile. Infragistics data grid inline editing (Excel like) is a nice feature which is not available in DevExpress. Other than that, data grid, master, detail setup, data grid dropdown list declaration and other feature are much more streamlined in DevExpress.
I have been using Telerik RAD Controls since several years. I am very satisfied with the ASP.NET Ajax and WinForms controls. I have not used DevExpress or Infragistics controls before but I had a look at both when I took the decision to use Telerik.
This is probably too late, but as I found this post while asking the same question I thought I would add my comment with respect to Telerik. I have previously used Infragistics, which I found OK, but I thought the performance wasn't great. Recently I worked a contract with a company who were using Telerik for Winforms and what we discovered was that there were a number of bugs in their controls. There support was great and they were quick to respond to questions or comments, but unfortunately most of the time when we raised a question on why something wasn't working, the answer was that it was a bug in their control. also their documentation states explicitly that their controls are not intended to be inherited, so while building your own custom control off the top of their control seems to work in most cases, it isn't recommended.
I'm a software developer, and I'm going onto a project now that involves implementing a website using ASP.NET (3.5 / 2008, using the Web Client Software Factory). I've been tasked at creating a UI / UX Design Document for the project, however I don't really know where to start.
I've been on one project in 3 years where there was a formal UI design document, which included layout and style guidelines/rules (e.g. the application has a header, navigation, etc., links must be colour A, buttons for positive actions must be on the right, etc. etc.). It was pretty useful in hindsight, I appreciated that someone went into that much effort too - even defining the CSS classes in the document. However, the doc was based on an existing application and conformed to the business' overall corporate identity.
The current project is a new project, which at the moment doesn't have clearly defined requirements (yes, I know... how do you design when there aren't many requirements... I digress). It is hard to know what functionality exactly will be needed. There are two different user types / personas, but no formal research will be performed on them for this document. Also, I'm not sure of the corporate identity, apart from that the business has some rules regarding use of their logo, which I'll only get further clarification on in a few days time.
So I'm slightly in the dark, throwing paint at a canvas, hoping I get a pretty picture at the end (if only I were Jackson Pollock).
What would you include in this document? It is aimed at the business (the client), as well as the developers. I can think of only the below:
Layout - header, footer, content, navigation
Styles - colour palette and styles of the different expected components
User Interactions - when a user performs an action and must wait they are notified by a modal dialog, validation is done using AJAX, navigation should be contextual, tasks should be performed with a minimum amount of clicking / navigation, etc. etc.
Has anyone got any experience in creating such a document, or any known, tried and tested process for UI design?
Thanks,
James
There' all sorts of elements that could be included in such a set of documentation:
visual style guidelines (colors, typefaces, sizes, icons, etc)
branding guidelines (corporate logos, colors, messaging, etc.)
copyrighting style guide (terminology, proper messaging, proper voice, etc.)
persona/demographic targetting
page layout guidelines
CSS guidelines/standards
JS guidelines/standards
use cases
accessibility issues
usability issues
example implementations
IA path flows
Wireframe components
etc.
I'd pick up this book if you can to give you a start on thinking about this:
http://www.amazon.com/Web-Anatomy-Interaction-Frameworks-ebook/dp/B002ZY5FCW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262983955&sr=8-2
Along with all the other obvious components of your planning document, it would be a good idea to sketch portions of the UI along with an accompanying narrative of the specific use cases illustrated.
I've had issues in the past when attempting to communicate UI ideas. It is often useful to make sketches of dialog boxes and sequences of actions. If those sketches look too "real", then there is a tendency for them to become the spec for the final product.
To mitigate this, I've been playing with Balsamiq Mockups. It has the nice property that it is an editable back of a napkin, and deliberately renders all objects and screen layouts with a hand-drawn feel. I like the results I've achieved with it for small, internal projects. I haven't (yet) had the chance to use it for a large project with many external stakeholders.
The Wikipedia article for Human Interface Guidlines has some great links that I was going to suggest. Some of them may have far more information than you require, but they should give you a good idea as to what types of things you should add.
I have always found Apple's guidelines very complete and useful, but they are definitely very complete and require a lot of reading.
UX documentation is a critical part of the UX design procedure. It functions as a connection, providing context to the product’s lifespan from the initial concept to the present iteration.
Good UX documentation is straightforward yet lean. It should be favorably attentive, actionable, and purposeful. UX documentation is a functional document of a product’s journey from the beginning to the current release. This documentation is important for several reasons:
Organizational memory
Onboarding & handovers
Single source of truth
Fosters better communication & collaboration
A valuable R&D and IP
When designing and building the UI for an application that uses AJAX, when do you consider graceful degradation (for users who have JavaScript disabled, or are using a screen reader)?
At the end, once the AJAX version of the site is completely finished
At every stage of development
I don't
Something else...
These days, progressive enhancement is generally preferred over graceful degradation - i.e. the exact opposite approach.
The method I'm employing so far is to write it so it works without JavaScript and then add the JavaScript on top.
It's really the reverse of graceful degradation. It's an emphasis on enhancing the page as your browser and settings allow.
Relevant article
Graceful degradation can describe two things:
It is a behaviour (normally a website or web application) that allows the site to continue functioning when certain features are disabled (e.g., JavaScript; CSS).
It is an approach that builds the application to work with bells and whistles turned on, and then afterwards fixes are bolted on to make it work without said noisemakers.
I assume you are asking whether or not to use the latter to achieve the former. I'd definitely suggest achieving 1), as anyone who browses with JavaScript off (i.e., lots of people with a computing clue; those using text-based browsers; those using disability aids) will otherwise not be able to use your site.
As for how to do it, A List Apart have a great article on progressive enhancement which is worth looking at, where you build the site to work basically first, and then you add the AJAX, etc. afterwards. I prefer this approach because it gives the app a solid foundation to work on, with decent security and functionality from the word go. Future enhancements to it can be made at the basic level and then added into the AJAX layer; without the former, it's harder to add in gracefully degrading components to the application in the future.
Anyway, enjoy the article and if you want to know more about this stuff generally, A List Apart is a great site!
Jeremy Keith sums up the argument for progressive enhancement with his Hijax article.
Typically, I use the following code to dynamically apply a class of "js" to the HTML element to target JavaScript-enabled browsers
<script type="text/javascript">if(h=document.documentElement)h.className+=" js"</script>