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At the recent ng-conf conference in Salt Lake City that brought developers together to learn about Angular.js, Jen Looper and Cody Lindley of the Telerik Developer Relations team met up with Ricardo Mello, Project Director of Wakanda, who explained how Kendo UI widgets are integrated into his company's flagship product, Wakanda. Of course, we wanted to learn more, so we interviewed Ricardo about how Wakanda and Kendo UI Core, together, bring beautiful web widgets to the masses.

So, what's Wakanda?

Wakanda is a platform for developers to build applications for desktop, web, and mobile devices. It includes a WakandaDB database solution, WakandaServer for web hosting, and Wakanda Studio IDE for development. It has broad appeal to many different kinds of developers, whether those who need to use drag-and-drop tools to build a quick prototype or those who need to do a deep dive into the source code.

What problem did Kendo UI Core solve for Wakanda?

"We have been using Kendo UI Core, the open source suite of Kendo widgets, for one year. The challenge we faced involved finding high-quality widgets that could be easily adapted to our development platform. Since Wakanda has a Studio IDE, we needed to have the ability to import the widget as a drag-and-drop element, a customizable and bindable component in our IDE.

"We've successfully imported different JavaScript libraries to our product, as virtually any JavaScript library can be imported by Wakanda. For example, we have adapted JQWidget and Wijmo into Wakanda, but none of these libraries were able to provide the quality or variety of open source widgets that Kendo UI Core offered.

"What made us invest time implementing Kendo UI Core widgets was the overall look and feel of these components as well as the the number of excellent widgets and the quality of the coding experience."

What did it take to integrate Kendo UI?

"We were able to adapt a Kendo UI Core widget in our Graphical IDE in matter of hours. Once adapted, the Kendo UI Core widget was available to all projects and to everybody in the Wakanda community as a drag-and-drop, bindable widget. That was a powerful hands-on offering to our community!

"Once Kendo UI Core was adapted to our framework, the widget became a Wakanda-Kendo widget, or what we term a "WaKendo" widget. From a client perspective, in a matter of seconds they could use the "Wakendo" widget in their pages.

"After that point, our developer clients have complete freedom to do what they like with these widgets. Some clients are building in local servers, other in the cloud, some are mobile users and others just desktop. "WaKendo" widgets are used by our clients on all kinds of devices and platforms."

What's next for Wakanda?

"Our first step is to import all the Kendo UI Core widgets to Wakanda. In the future, we would like to also offer the Professional suite of Kendo widgets such as the Grid, Editor, and Scheduler. That would provide an even greater variety of options to our clients.

"In our opinion, Telerik offers one of the best widget packages on the market. From our point of view, Wakanda is a data-centric platform that utilizes widgets combined with data binding to offer a full development environment for developers. If you'd like to take a look at our integration and follow its progress, the Github repo is here.

"Simply put, the Kendo UI Core is enriching our Wakanda ecosystem by providing a growing number of widgets to our community. So far, it's going really well!"

Building with "Wakendo" widgets

  1. Choose a widget via the add-on menu in Wakanda Studio
  2. wakanda_1
  3. Customize your widget
  4. wakanda_2
  5. Add it to your webpage and view it in a browser
  6. wakanda_3

Learn more about Wakanda:


Jen Looper is a Developer Advocate at Telerik.
About the Author

Jen Looper

Jen Looper is a Developer Advocate for Telerik products at Progress. She is a web and mobile developer and founder of Ladeez First Media which is a small indie mobile development studio. In her spare time, she is a dancer, teacher and multiculturalist who is always learning.

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