Progress, the trusted provider of infrastructure software, announced the R2 2024 release of Progress Telerik and Progress Kendo UI, the most powerful .NET and JavaScript UI libraries and tools for application development. The release delivers artificial intelligence (AI) prompts to application interfaces, design-to-code productivity, accessibility features and a series of new UI components, including the first-to-market Blazor Spreadsheet component.
“Businesses are rapidly adapting their products to take advantage of AI and developers have to respond quickly to this new opportunity,” said Loren Jarrett, EVP & GM, Digital Experience, Progress. “With this latest release, we make it easy for developers to include Gen AI prompts in their apps and embed AI for a better UX in addition to advanced design to code automation and accessibility features. The world is moving quickly, and we are empowering developers to stay ahead of the game.”
What’s new in Q2 2024:
UI components for GenAI integration
The new AI Prompt component, available across all Telerik and Kendo UI libraries, enables the creation of quality content, messages, and documents and fast access to information through in-UI searches. To reduce the learning curve, AI integration demos in Telerik and Kendo UI libraries for components such as TextBox and Spreadsheet help developers discover new ways to include AI-powered interactions within their digital experiences.
Accelerated design-to-production workflows
While design systems are necessary for design consistency, translating design to code often causes issues and delays in production time. With today’s release, Progress improves the designer-to-developer handoff with enhanced Figma UI Kits, improved colour system themes and enriched design system documentation. Developers can further enable brand consistency and meet app standardisation requirements through the newly introduced unified rendering across JavaScript and .NET web frameworks. They can leverage over 600 component-specific theme variables and a smart CSS code editor in the Progress ThemeBuilder cloud application.
Next-level accessibility and inclusivity
Recent global research commissioned by Progress shows that 76% of developers consider building human-centric applications – with accessibility at the core – more important than it was two years ago. To help them advance their efforts and address users’ specific needs, the Telerik and Kendo UI libraries are compliant with Section 508, WCAG 2.2 and WAI Aria. In addition, all web chart components provide built-in accessibility and keyboard navigation to make data visualisations accessible to all.
Progress also released new capabilities for embedded data-driven experiences with reporting and visualisation features, modernisation of legacy projects with support for complex migration scenarios as well as support for .NET 9 Preview.