By now everyone and their mother has heard about Microsoft’s adoption and support of jQuery, the little JavaScript Library that kicks big-ass. If you haven’t, go read The Gu’s announcement for the low-down.
Every tech-blogger on the internet seems to be going ga-ga over the news with hundreds of blog posts regurgitating the announcement. But Fear not, this is not going to be one of those blog posts.
Its all because of me!
Last Friday while showing a couple of ‘softies a prototype web app I’m helping build I mentioned we were using jQuery to build out the rich drag-n-drop-web-2.0-ish UX. I could tell they were impressed with what we’d done… but they were blown away when I showed them the 33 lines of jQuery code, including some white space, it took to build the functionality.
I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time, but given the recent announcement about MSFT + jQuery, I’m going to go ahead and take full credit for making it happen!* :)
The real news…
Its great that developers who’ve been forced into a Microsoft-only stack – “No Open Source for you!” – might finally have an opportunity to spread their wings a bit and see what the OSS-fuss is all about. But I have to agree with Ayende – there is a bigger story here:
This is the first time in a long time that I have seen Microsoft incorporating an Open Source project into their product line.
I am both thrilled and shocked.
In the end, I think this is a big win for all of us and hope that its a sign of good things to come.