In another interesting development showing that open source truly has a place in corporate computing, Microsoft announced on Sunday that it will be adding the JQuery JavaScript library to ASP.NET. The move came after many ASP.NET developers requested similar features to those that JQuery provides.
According to Scott Guthrie of Microsoft, the JQuery library will ship with Visual Studio, and a download will be available in the coming weeks to add the library to the latest version of Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express (with service pack 1 installed). Microsoft will add intellisense support for the library, but will not alter its code. They plan to distribute the library "as-is", directly from the main JQuery branch. They have even pledged to tests, patches, and bug fixes to the JQuery project.
Going forward, it seems that the JQuery team supports Microsoft on this. And why not? With a company like Microsoft integrating it into their widely used ASP.NET platform, JQuery can spread to the broader reaches of the web development spectrum. The move should also make the day of the open source community at large; it seems that more and more major companies are becoming less reluctant to adopt open source, and the stigma associated with it is beginning to dissolve.
In case you have no idea what JQuery is, it's a small open source JavaScript library that allows developers to quickly access HTML DOM objects using CSS selectors, and apply operations to them (including animations). The library also provides several utility functions (such as a ridiculously easy to use XML parser) and is extensible by plug-ins. The coding convention that it uses radically simplifies the once elusive JavaScript programming language.
The only thing the jQuery team needs to do now is make their web site more reliable.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx
