IBM Cloud Pak® for Applications (CP4Apps) is an end-to-end hybrid cloud application platform, providing flexibility for deployments, building new cloud-native applications, refactoring and re-platforming existing applications. Designed to leverage a collection of application runtimes, modernization tools and a Kubernetes container platform to adapt to their landscape needs.
N/A
Progress Kendo UI
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Kendo UI is a JavaScript UI toolkit that allows users to build responsive web-based apps integrated into their framework of choice (jQuery, Angular, React, or Vue). The vendor’s value proposition is that Kendo UI offers a large library of popular and configurable components ranging from sophisticated grids and charts to basic buttons, so users don’t have to waste development time building their UI. The vendor also says the large library of customizable themes means users can easily deploy a…
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is clearly suitable for modernizing the WebSphere runtime from the heavy, complex and expensive WAS-ND, and to a lesser extent WAS-base, to the super simple, fast and lightweight WebSphere Liberty runtime. I guarantee, once you start using Liberty you'll never look back. Enough cannot be said about how awesome Transformation Advisor is. The output analysis it produces, along with the migration plan and associated artifacts, considerably simplifies both the decision-making process surrounding modernization and subsequent implementation. Without TA we would've made bad decisions by blindly picking unsuitable apps for moving from WAS to Liberty. Using the results from TA we've excluded multiple WAS apps from our immediate plans to migrate to Liberty, saving time and effort that probably would have resulted in a failed migration. We recently used Transformation Advisor to help us successfully migrate an app from Tomcat to WebSphere Liberty. We needed to make some changes to the Tomcat app, but TA helped highlight these required changes. Without TA I'm not sure we would have succeeded.
Kendo UI works well if developing web UI applications which have simple layout designs. - Good A scenario where there are a lot of Kendo widgets on a single UI page, and each has a complex initialization. - Not so good
Kendo Grid for presenting a timeline of research grants as they are being approved. Our users love the ability to export the data to various mime formats.
Kendo Scheduler for presenting the upcoming calendar events in the available conference rooms in a building. This is used together with a 3rd party vendor API for appointment booking.
Kendo Treeview is used to present a hierarchy of topics that our users can navigate through easily.
While the licensing is considerably simplified than it used to be, I still find it somewhat confusing. For example, WebSphere Liberty Core has an 8:1 VPC ratio. This is clear when dealing with VMs but it is still not clear to me as to whether we get an 8:1 ratio when running on OpenShift or whether we need to purchase additional OpenShift licenses to support running WebSphere Liberty Core in OpenShift.
Not so much related to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, but while Transformation Advisor is an indispensable tool to help modernize to the WebSphere Liberty runtime, I wish we could run it against WebSphere Liberty itself. The reason being, we are now using TA as a single repository for our configurations. TA also highlights many potential issues when migrating to Liberty; these issues may also be applicable for apps already running in Liberty, we just don't know it yet.
Kendo UI is always moving forward and staying current with latest development trends. While that is beneficial, that can cause some issues when supporting customers (particularly government) that don't move their IT infrastructure along nearly as fast. A prime example is web font icons. Great and easy to use, but where Kendo UI utilizes web font icons as the sole means of displaying an icon, not all organizations (again, especially government) allow the use of these. There have been times where Kendo UI became unusable and we had to downgrade to a version a few years old. Makes continued payment for licenses sometimes feel wasted as we may not be able to always use the new releases
Kendo UI has a wonderful feedback system and they do indeed listen to the community. However, there do seem to be some instances where there is large support for a new feature/component and it never gets addressed. It is easy to understand that not all ideas are easy or even prudent to implement, but would be nice to see a better follow-up on ideas with a current status
Refreshing Kendo UI grids is simple, yet the standard API method causes the grid to return to the default state. We have many use cases where we would love to update the grid data but need current grid state (such as expanded detail rows, sorts, filters, etc) preserved after the grid is updated so that users do not have to perform grid actions again to return to the desired state.
Since we are using Kendo on a legacy product, there is likely a time when we will no longer support it. We are evaluating Kendo for our future product, in which case we may continue to use Kendo for an extended period of time.
My initial score would be 10, but I am aware of the high price for its implementation. Therefore, I would recommend it only in large projects where a large profit margin can be obtained. But in general, I recommend it. I am currently using it without problems.
Overall, we are satisfied with the support offered by the Progress Kendo UI team. We had raised few helpline incidents in the past and they have been resolved timely by the team. Also, we were satisfied with the level of information and support provided by the team.
I think the main thing is to get into a Kendo mindset. Components that I've used in the past had a much different mindset and I think it got in my way. Sometimes I would use something different if I felt that the Kendo component was being too obstinate. I would go back later and replace that with the Kendo component when I had time to work with it further.
Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.
I did not experience the other product that has such an integrated and user-friendly feature. It works more like an everyday query with the UI element in a totally aesthetic and attractive view. With the Kendo library, we don't need to develop every UI component from the beginning. It was one of the faster development of applications.
Positive impact is that it helps development team to focus on business logic rather than developing UI control and that resulted in good productivity savings. productivity saving is significant (like 30% of product development cost).
