jQuery Surprise
Give Microsoft this: The company knows how to fill a news cycle. Over the past
week, we've seen new information released about
.NET
Framework 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and the new
Dublin
app server technologies. All of this, of course, just a few weeks ahead
of the dev-apalooza that will be PDC 2008.
But lost among all the talk of fresh IDEs and frameworks is this
little gem from Microsoft Dev Div chief Scott Guthrie about the jQuery JavaScript
library, which will be incorporated into Visual Studio and ASP.NET:
"I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery
with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript
library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main
jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing
jQuery MIT license."
That sound you just heard was a million Web developers collectively shouting,
"Hell yeah!"
As Kurt Mackie reports
for RedDevNews.com, jQuery is a lightweight and simple JavaScript library that
enables interaction between JavaScript and HTML. While jQuery is an intriguing
tool for AJAX-bound Web developers, the most remarkable thing was Microsoft's
decision to forego creating a planned jQuery alternative of its own and to adopt
the open source JavaScript library instead.
Guthrie wrote in his blog entry: "Rather than duplicate functionality,
we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard,
supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features
that took advantage of it?"
Andrew Brust is a Microsoft Regional Director and chief of New Technology at
consultancy twentysix New York. He's clearly impressed with Guthrie's stance
in this and, honestly, so am I. As Brust noted in his BrustBlog
entry:
"Scott's quote demonstrates an uncanny display of common sense that
is not necessarily, ummm...Microsoft's hallmark. I believe strongly that this
pragmatist, apolitical approach to making .NET better and working with the
broad developer community to serve their interests has a strong believer and
advocate in Scott Guthrie and that his rising influence in the developer division
means we'll continue to see such announcements made and measures taken. This
is Microsoft at its best. Bravo."
Bravo, indeed, Microsoft.
What do you think of Microsoft's jQuery decision and how might jQuery fit into
your development efforts? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/02/2008