Microsoft to Actively Support jQuery JavaScript Library Development

by Peter Galli on March 16, 2010 11:15am

In his keynote address today at  MIX10, Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, announced Microsoft is taking a more active role participating in the open-source, community-driven development of the jQuery JavaScript Library.

Microsoft will now work in concert with the jQuery JavaScript Library team to accelerate the creation of new features that make creating rich-web applications on any platform faster and easier.

Microsoft's first involvement with the jQuery JavaScript Library team is to propose a powerful feature making it easier for developers to build client-side, data-driven web applications and, as such, the company has contributed a templating engine for evaluation and improvement to the jQuery JavaScript Library.

The goal here is to help ensure this is a primary way to develop rich, JavaScript based client-side internet applications. Read more about this on Scott's blog and John Resig's blog.

And, going forward, the company also plans to assist in the development of both standards-based and ASP.NET based jQuery Plugins aimed to simplify interoperability between the two platforms, and Microsoft will now help make the jQuery JavaScript Library a primary development option on Windows.

Microsoft is already a big, and longtime supporter of the jQuery JavaScript Library, and will include the jQuery JavaScript Library 1.4.1 in its releases of both Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 products.

As such, Microsoft is also adopting the open source approach to development that the jQuery JavaScript Library community uses, meaning the community can provide direct feedback and contribute to the materials that Microsoft's developers contribute to the jQuery JavaScript Library.

The jQuery Foundation will redistribute works provided under its own licenses.

Also announced at MIX10 was the release of new software development kits for the Open Data Protocol (OData), which make it easier for developers to access data from the cloud to create more compelling cross-platform Web applications.