Microsoft to take active role in jQuery JavaScript Library development

During his keynote address at this year's MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, announced that Microsoft will be taking a more active role in the development of the open source jQuery JavaScript Library. According to a post on Microsoft's Port 25 blog by Peter Galli, Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, "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 says that its first act will be to propose a new feature to the jQuery team to make it easier for developers to build client-side, data-driven web applications. The company has already contributed a templating engine for evaluation for that purpose and hopes that it will be used to improve jQuery. Microsoft will also include version 1.4.1 of the jQuery JavaScript Library in both its Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 products.

In addition to code contributions and product integration, the company promises to allocate additional resources towards the project and to "target specific functionalities in areas of mutual interest", including Templating, Script Loading and Data Binding. Resources will also be provided to further assist in QA testing of jQuery in new environments. Both Microsoft and the jQuery team hope that the move will aid in ensuring "continued stability and longevity of the library".

The latest release of the jQuery JavaScript Library is version 1.4.2 from the middle of February. jQuery is dual licensed under the MIT or GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2 licenses.

See also:

• Microsoft to expand its collaboration with the jQuery community, a jQuery blog post.

(crve)