eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Infragistics, a provider of design, development and collaboration tools for developers, continues to evolve its portfolio to meet the demands of enterprise developers who are tasked with turning out new Web, mobile and desktop applications for the enterprise user.
That means delivering tools that help developers meet the requirements of the enterprise environment, including performance, reliability, scalability and security. In that regard, Infragistics released the latest version of its toolset this week. Infragistics Ultimate 16.1 is the company’s enterprise-ready Web, mobile and desktop user interface development suite.
The new Infragistics Ultimate 16.1 simplifies the development of visual native iOS and Android applications, cross-platform applications with Xamarin, Web apps with the AngularJS and hybrid apps with HTML5 using Cordova.
“Our dev tools focus is the major driver for the business today,” said Jason Beres, senior vice president of developer tools at Infragistics, in an interview with eWEEK. “We’ve expanded beyond the traditional .NET platforms.”
Now offering support for iOS and Android, the company provides integration with Xamarin and Xamarin Forms so developers can use Visual Studio to build native applications targeting any device. Infragistics also has good story for Angular support for HTML5, which allows for not only desktop Web apps, but mobility as well. If a developer wants to build an Angular app with Cordova and deploy it to the App Store, Infragistics supports that.
For Web development, Ultimate 16.1 features enhanced ASP.NET controls for building stylish apps that can process large amounts of data. The new JavaScript/HTML5 controls and AngularJS components help developers build apps that run across every browser on any platform or device.
For mobile app development, Xamarin offers lightweight toolsets for building applications for smartphones and tablets. The company’s Xamarin Forms UI controls enable developers to build native apps supported by Infragistics’ iOS and Android toolsets. This enables .NET developers to use C# and XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) to build cross-platform apps rather than having to learn a new language like Objective-C, Swift or Java, Beres said.
The Infragistics iOS toolset provides the components needed to create native iPad and iPhone applications, with an advanced data grid and a set of versatile charts perfect for enterprise mobile applications. And the Infragistics Android controls include data grid, gauges, barcodes and more in a modular API. It includes chart functionality and features support for natural multitouch gestures for panning and zooming to see data any way.
“The driver overall, or our claim to fame and what drives Infragistics, is that we deliver high performance, tabular grids, data grids and pivot grids for connecting to data and being able to display that data in almost any way,” Beres said. “And on the visualization side we provide super-rich data visualization that financial services, health care and insurance really need for their applications.”
For desktop development, Infragistics Ultimate 16.1 features Desktop Windows Forms and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) controls that provide touch capabilities, bold styling and fast speed. The solution offers more than 175 Windows Forms and WPF UI controls for creating user experiences featuring high-volume, high-performance rendering capabilities and animation support for rich data visualizations, as well as pixel-perfect Microsoft Office experiences for Excel, Word and more.
This release includes new QR and 128 barcodes in Windows Forms, along with pie and doughnut charts, a new XAML 3D surface chart and new Windows Forms Excel Spreadsheet control, and more, Beres said.
Infragistics Updates Ultimate Software Development Toolkit
Meanwhile, Infragistics brought its ReportPlus Developer and SharePlus tools to its Ultimate platform. With ReportPlus Developer, application developers can embed data visualizations and dashboards into desktop, Web and native iOS mobile apps. And ReportPlus enables developers to provide code-free visualizations that match the look and feel of their apps. They can integrate data directly from more than 20 sources outside the application.
In addition, developers can use their existing Web development skills to build native iOS and Android SharePlus solutions with a SharePlus developer license included in Infragistics Ultimate and Pro, Beres said. Infragistics SharePlus is a collaboration and productivity application for Microsoft SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 on mobile devices.
The latest release enables developers to build custom mobile workspaces. SharePlus extends centralized access to content and data across the cloud with OneDrive for Business, Dropbox and Google Drive, or on corporate network drives, he said.
“At Infragistics, we believe the choice is simple. Your UX design and UI development solutions should be enterprise-grade and comprehensive, offering everything you need with no hidden or add-on costs,” said Beres in a statement. “Developers should be able to deliver a great user experience that their organizations and customers expect—even if they are not a user experience expert.”
Infragistics also updated its Indigo Studio prototyping tool for building interactive, responsive application prototypes without writing code and then sharing them on indigodesigned.com. The tool’s new usability testing features provide insights on how well the prototype will perform with real people.
“We’ve evolved Indigo Studio into a tool for doing interactive UX flows, and we’ve introduced remote usability testing,” Beres said. “So now you can create designs on your desktop for mobile apps or desktop apps and deploy it to our cloud. Then through our cloud you can set up usability tests and you can scale to thousands of people testing an application and get analytics and feedback on those tests.”
The tool also features code asset generation, which enables developers to build a prototype and select states of a screen. Developers can pull out clean HTML/JavaScript from that and then use that in an application to kick-start the screen design, which has already been approved and tested. With Indigo Studio, developers can test design alternatives remotely and get concise study summaries, task success rates, completion times and a click-map view to find out how well the design meets users’ expectations.
“From a developer tools perspective, we’ve just evolved with the changing enterprise needs. It’s grown beyond .NET,” Beres told eWEEK. “But the enterprise is still heavily invested in .NET. Overall, the enterprise is driving toward the Web, mobile and the desktop.”
With that, there is a lot of interest in taking existing rich client applications and moving them to a browser using ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio or Angular, he said. In addition, a lot of enterprises are looking at responsive Web design to ensure that if they build out a line of business apps that goes into a desktop browser, they can view it on any device.
“So there’s a lot of that going on, but the .NET world is still very strong in the enterprise as far as rich client goes,” Beres said.