Tag: ajax

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Microsoft and Nokia adopt jQuery

(Note: This entry was originally published on the Skyscanner Geeks blog.)

Here’s something I didn’t see coming:  Microsoft and Nokia have announced that they are adopting jQuery as part of their application development platforms. 

What this means on the Microsoft side of things is that they will provide an intellisense-annotated version of jQuery for Visual Studio 2008 (available as a separate download in a few weeks), and will also distribute it as part of the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC release.  Expect it to be even more tightly integrated with the newly announced Visual Studio 2010. (We’re talking about products with 2010 as part of their version name? Already?)

Further notes on the announcement and integration:

We use YUI as the base library for our JavaScript code at Skyscanner, but jQuery is a sweet and slick package. Making it part of the ASP.NET MVC release is a splendid idea. The ASP.NET page model has always felt fat and bloated to me, and the Atlas extensions are a very clever but awkward hack to tap into this model. The combination of ASP.NET MVC + jQuery might actually allow you to write clean web pages with progressively enhanced Ajax functionality out of the box.

Might .NET actually become a cool platform for writing web apps?

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Dynamically created (or included) Javascript

Dynamically created page elements? No problem. Dynamically created Javascript? As in, using document.createElement() to create a <script> element? Sounds like black magic, and it’s not something I would have tried myself until I saw the article @import voor JavaScript on Naar Voren (in Dutch). Basically, it’s a technique for giving Javascript the ability to include other script files “on demand,” much in the same way as PHP’s include() and include_once() functions.

This technique has actually been around for a while: a quick google showed me the article “Javascript includes – yet another way of RPC-ing”, by Stoyan Stefanov from July of this year, which in turn points back to articles from 2002. In addition to making the whole include() thing possible (a fantastically useful feature), using dynamically generated script also allows you to use make remote calls to other domains–something the HmlHttpRequest object forbids. In fact, Simon Willison was just talking about this the other day, in the context of Yahoo!’s web service APIs now providing output in JSON format as well as traditional XML.

It’s all coming together. A bundle of key techniques that have been around for ages (Unobtrusive javascript, object-oriented javascript, Ajax/remote scripting) have suddenly seen massive adoption and tremendous development. Javascript has matured a great deal over the course of 2005, and is rapidly tuning into one of the cornerstones of modern web development. It’s a very exciting time for the field.