We are transitioning to develop a web app, and we have selected to use React for our front end. I've looked at Kendo UI as a tool to help out. I am looking for some feedback on the Kendo UI tool and any others that are good. The desktop software that we are replacing has about 150 forms. The app is currently only going to be used inhouse and is connected to SQL server. Thanks in advance!
Thanks for providing detail around what you're looking for, Doug! That helps me respond with more confidence: sounds like the React Form component that is part of Kendo UI will save you time and trouble. I'm part of the KendoReact team (the team that's building the React-specific UI library within Kendo UI), and one thing we've discovered is that writing a Form component may look simple, but is far from trivial to write - and to get right. To help developers with this, beyond the Form component itself, we created design guidelines for writing great forms in React (linked with this response) - a reference document that combines years of experience and in-depth research. My best advice is to try the KendoReact Form (and any other components your app needs) in a PoC and test it in action. The library is well documented and if you sign up for a trial, you also get free technical support from the team - we've done our best to make evaluating (and using!) our product as easy as possible.
Why go for a paid solution, when battle-tested Bootstrap is free? Bootstrap is easy to configure and customize, and is the most popular frontend library. Especially if this is going to be an in-house solution, I'd go for Bootstrap. Unless there are specific features you need that are only available in Kendo UI.
I have used Kendo UI in Html/JQuery and AngularJS, but not React. I have also used Bootstrap, and some other tools. In one applicaton we used both Kendo UI and an older version of Bootstrap. We used Bootstrap for its responsiveness and 12-column layout , and Kendo for all the UI. The product won an industry award for its UI. I think very highly of Kendo, due to 1) its many good examples, 2) its superior Grid (including nested rows), 3) the number of controls you get , including incredible graphs, 4) its attention to getting the details right, on even simple controls like single-select and multi-select Dropdowns. The cost of Kendo is recovered by all the time you save. Where I work now they are phasing out Bootstrap because they think FlexBox is better. Except that now I just saw that the latest Bootstrap uses FlexBox. Our QA was really big on automated UI testing, and they were able to that just fine with Kendo UI. Just make sure you give everything an ID.
