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Icenium 1.5 features integration with Kendo UI DataViz for creating charts, dashboards

Telerik has updated its cross-platform Icenium development platform. The new incarnation, version 1.5, is designed to simplify mobile app development by adding cloud-based services, eliminating the need for supporting infrastructure. 

In its announcement, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company notes a prediction by industry research firm Gartner that, by 2016, “40 percent of mobile application development projects will leverage cloud mobile back-end services.” Telerik said its platform is helping to point developers in that direction, with new cloud-hosted data and file storage, user management, cloud code execution and email notifications.

Integrated Cloud Environment

In October, Telerik, a provider of software application and content management solutions, released Icenium. The company has described Icenium as the industry’s first Integrated Cloud Environment, or ICE, which combines the cloud with a local development environment. This contrasts with a traditional IDE or integrated development environment, and Telerik said Icenium provides more flexibility in coding for all iOS or Android devices.

By exposing software development kits, or SDKs, through a cloud service, Telerik said Icenium “decoupled the coding environment from the platform dependencies.” In Icenium, HTML5, CSS and Javascript are utilized for creating hybrid apps that utilize device APIs to run natively on iOS and Android platforms.

While native apps are written to a specific platform in order to optimize performance and the ability to access device capabilities such as a camera, hybrid apps use web technologies like HTML5 and run inside a native container, with a web-to-native layer that enables access to the device resources.

Templates, Data Navigator

New features in Icenium 1.5 also include Everlive project templates, which automatically create required types and fields on the cloud back-end, and data navigator for directly exploring the back-end structure of projects, such as permissions or fields.

The platform also includes cloud-based code that is designed to handle business logic and validations on the back end in order to boost client-side performance, and user management that requires only a few lines of code to allow user registration, with most of the authentication and authorization taking place on the back end.

Icenium utilizes Kendo UI, Telerik’s HTML/Javascript framework for interface development. The new Icenium incorporates Kendo’s DataViz, which provides rich media HTML5 charts and gauges for hybrid mobile apps. The company said DataViz offers the ability to render “sleek charts” in current and older browsers on iOS and Android devices.