Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating

About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies.

What does this announcement mean?

It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery.

We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same way that any other company or individual from the community can contribute to jQuery. We are writing proposals, submitting the proposals to the jQuery forums, and revising the proposals in response to community feedback. The jQuery team can decide to reject or accept any feature that we propose.

Any feature that Microsoft contributes to jQuery will be platform neutral. In other words, Microsoft contributions will benefit PHP and RAILS developers just as much as they benefit ASP.NET developers. Microsoft contributions to jQuery will improve the web for everyone.

Contributing Support for Templates to jQuery Core

Our first proposal concerns templating. We want to contribute support for templates to jQuery so that JavaScript developers can use jQuery to easily display a set of database records. You can read our templating proposal here:

http://wiki.github.com/nje/jquery/jquery-templates-proposal

You can download and play with our prototype for templating here:

http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl

The following code illustrates how you can use a template to display a set of products in a bulleted list: