Written by: Lynn Cadet
Edited by: Lillian Castro
TL; DR: Progress provides software engineers with the infrastructure to optimize their application development cycles. The company recently released a number of new components for its Telerik and Kendo UI development libraries. These additions equip developers with more customizations to build and deploy applications that improve user interface and deliver on experience. Progress also ensures accessibility and style throughout its application models and components.
Every great craftsman needs tools and resources to be successful. These tools help them optimize their production cycle and create a product that will attract customers. Like a wordsmith or blacksmith, a developer requires a range of resources to navigate the complex journey to project completion.
Development can be tricky, and it takes skill to build and deploy an app that users can interact and work with on a daily basis. A satisfying user experience is usually the end goal, and to achieve that, developers need to leverage tools that can improve user interface design.
Progress provides developers with a collection of tools to accelerate their path to innovation. Progress equips software engineers with the necessary infrastructure to build and launch apps from UX tools to DevOps platforms. The company recently updated two UI tools, Telerik and Kendo UI, to help developers advance their efforts in the .NET and JavaScript space.
“Our components by design are set up to help with developer productivity. We focus on building components that are ready to use, easy to implement, and beautifully styled. This release is no exception to that,” said Sara Faatz, Director of Developer Relations at Progress.
With Progress, software engineers can optimize their development projects and adapt to technological shifts within the market. Its tools also help developers deploy applications that efficiently deliver on customer needs and provide a smooth user experience.
“We want to support our customers, whether they’re writing legacy applications or writing the most modern cutting edge applications. And so, with this release, we’re ensuring that we’re still doing that,” said Sara.
Meeting Developers Where They Are
Progress takes pride in helping software engineers accelerate their development, no matter the stage or project. Its mission is to empower developers and provide them with the necessary solutions along their product journey.
“We’re at this critical moment where you can say there are so many choices and ways for developers to think about development, in general. What is the right way to go? I think the web has always been this big space for developers to make decisions and navigate through,” said Sara.
Progress serves as a guide and a provider in this broad landscape. Its wide range of solutions allows users to boost productivity and save time and money, whether they’re modernizing an application or creating cutting-edge software.
“We’re doing that legwork. So users can easily have those beautifully styled applications that are also accessible,” said Sara.
The Progress team regularly updates its themes to maintain modernization, allowing those working with legacy applications to join the trend. The company supports multiple frameworks and supplies suites for Blazor, Angular, and React, among other frameworks.
Web development is a continuously evolving field, and Progress considers that by recognizing the need for new updates or additions in its product line. As for choosing components to add, Progress goes straight to the source, its customers, to meet the demand.
“Our forums and up-voted items are the ones that make it into the road maps. We always encourage people to tell us what they want because that is how we build our development road map,” said Sara.
Progress Telerik and Kendo UI Support Developer Productivity
Progress helps software engineers join all the pieces in their development puzzle. With its solutions, users can deploy with speed, scale, and increased uptime, among other benefits.
Kendo UI has a jQuery, Vue, React, and Angular component library. These libraries equip developers with hundreds of components to optimize user interaction, including drag-and-drop utilities, QR codes, and PivotGrid. These tools are also easy to implement and prioritize accessibility.
Progress Telerik helps users speed up their development cycle and cut time to market. Users can leverage its solutions for almost every platform and framework, including Blazor, .NET Maui, and WIN UI. Its Blazor library now has more than 90 native components, and developers can use additions such as Heatmap, Color Picker, and File Select, among other tools, to customize applications. Progress has also added REPL Playgrounds for Blazor and ASP.NET Core.
“The REPLs are browser-based tools that allow developers, whether they are using our components or not, to write, run and save code and share those snippets with others,” said Sara.
Since the user interface is key to the experience, software engineers must combine design and development to deliver the best application to the market. Progress provides the tools to help developers in the design process, whether they’re doing it themselves or working with a designer. Its Figma kits are customizable and enable developers to simplify collaboration.
“We recently released our Figma Kits for developers and support our most popular components. This enables smooth designer-developer collaboration and eliminates unnecessary back and forth,” said Sara.
But, Progress doesn’t only assist software engineers in their development stage. Its provision goes beyond that.
“Additionally, we released improvements to our Reporting, testing, debugging and mocking tools in this release. It was a full release with something for everyone,” said Sara.
Democratizing App Usage and Educating Consumers
Accessibility remains a top priority for Progress, and democratizing application usage is a step toward achieving that mission. Sara said accessible user experience is a significant piece to Progress’ business model, and the team makes sure that its components are compliant.
“We continue to find ways for developers to deliver apps with that modern design and accessible UX, making sure that people are thinking with an accessibility-first mindset,” said Sara.
The Progress team also shares accessibility knowledge to help developers become more acclimated with its usage. Sara told us that Progress posts 30 to 40 blog articles and live streams on Twitch Monday to Friday to educate users. And the content is based on topics its customers and developers request about all areas of development.
As for future plans, Progress looks to provide new and innovative solutions for developers to build the web. With .NET Maui scheduled to be released in the latter half of 2022, Sara said Progress worked closely with Microsoft to provide a comprehensive component suite for Maui. It also seeks to simplify the testing side of development and turn it into a less daunting task for users.
“Making testing and debugging more approachable to the developer is a surefire way to make stronger, better apps for tomorrow. So we have the tools to make it a lot less scary and something that all developers should be doing,” said Sara.
