jQuery and Microsoft Will Extend Their Collaboration

John Resig, jQuery's author and Mozilla employee, announced on March 16, 2010 that Microsoft would be continuing and even extending their involvement in the jQuery project. The Redmond-based giant will be delivering project integrations, new initiatives, code contributors and allocation of additional resources.

The tremendous success jQuery is experiencing among developers has not been ignored by lead players in the programming and development world. While Google and Mozilla have always supported jQuery, Microsoft was late to the party but seems poised to catch up and take the lead.

The announcement was made public the first time at MIX 2010 by a Microsoft representative and comes to continue the previous two-year collaboration between the parties. This time around, the Redmond-based company will be targeting more specific areas ranging from data binding support, enhancing the script loading times, while also implementing templating methods for the library.

Already, an effort has been launched by Microsoft to implement a templating engine, submitting a proposal for public review to jQuery's community, along with an experimental plugin hosted on GitHub.

The object of this proposal is to enable jQuery developers to take advantage of a standard method for declaring and rendering templates. Microsoft's suggestion includes the creation of a new method called renderTemplate() that can render a single JavaScript object or an array of JavaScript objects by using HTML fragments as the template.

This presentation for action from the software giant can also make it easier for developers to retrieve and display database data when working on the library. If approved, the templating engine will then be maintained as an official jQuery plugin, or if done right, it can even be included in jQuery's core.

This announcement also means that jQuery will continue to be hosted on the Microsoft CDN, as it has been for the last years. Besides physical and server resources, the Redmond-based company will be allocating additional resources for QA testing jQuery in various environments.