Microsoft Selects Open-Source jQuery JFor Visual Studio
Microsoft said Sunday that it proposes to introduce the JQuery JavaScript library with its Visual Studio developer tool suite.
Over on the ASP.net blog entries by Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman just announced that Microsoft will be supporting the jQuery JavaScript library as part of its official development platform with future releases of Visual Studio.
Another jQuery blog entry by John Resig deals with the announcement from the jQuery project’s perspective.
The software major and Nokia announce support for the open-source jQuery JavaScript library, which will be backed by the Intellisense code completion. Microsoft added that the jQuery would be one of the libraries used to put into practice higher-level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit, and would also have a role in new Ajax server-side helper methods.
In addition, Microsoft will provide tests and patches to the project, and says it will ship jQuery as part of its Visual Studio tool set “as-is,” considering that the developers will be able to take advantage of all the existing jQuery libraries and samples. The offering will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation. Microsoft and Nokia join a long list of jQuery users, including Google, Intel, IBM, Intuit, Reuters, and many others.
jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library that makes it easier to use JavaScript for writing Web pages that provide interactivity and in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web, said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, in a blog announcing Microsoft’s support of jQuery.
It helps to smooth over the differences between different browser versions, so the same code has a complete liberty of working both on IE, Firefox, and Safari. Microsoft’s interest in jQuery probably is not the cross-browser aspect, but instead its ability to easily implement special effects and Ajax communications.
John Resig, the creator of jQuery, who also is a chief evangelist at Mozilla, said Microsoft joins a long list of jQuery users, including Google, Intel, IBM, Intuit, Reuters, and many others. Resig also announced that Nokia, too, has adopted jQuery as of Sept. 28.
Resig, who is received with rock star status at open source conferences, said in a blog post:
“Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with.”
The best part of the application of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly and efficiently find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice “selector” API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply “commands” to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be “chained” together – so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.
There are many other JavaScript libraries that do similar things, such as Yahoo UI, Mootools, and Prototype. As recently as early July this year, it appeared that Microsoft might be leaning toward extending its own Ajax.NET to add jQuery-like features, but they apparently decided to table that effort and go with authentic jQuery.
Microsoft’s announcement looks like a total acceptance of jQuery. Future versions of Visual Studio will ship with jQuery in the package. Visual Studio will include IntelliSense that understands jQuery functions and provides documentation. Microsoft Product Support Services will provide help for jQuery-based projects. A Microsoft shop can use jQuery knowing it is fully supported.
Source: news.ebrandz.com
Tags: Google Chrome, internet, Javascript, Latest Software, Microsoft, Software News, Visual Studio