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jQuery Adds Support for Windows Store Apps, Creates New Opportunities for JavaScript Open Source Developers

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jQueryonWinRTThe popular open source JavaScript Web framework jQuery is adding full support for Windows Store applications in the upcoming v2.0 release, thanks to recent contributions from appendTo with technical support from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech). Considering the opportunity Windows Store apps represent for developers, this is a great news for JavaScript developers who can now develop apps for Windows 8 using what they already know along with their existing JavaScript code, hopefully leading to a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.

The Windows 8 application platform introduced support for HTML5 and JavaScript development leveraging the same standard-based HTML5 and JavaScript engines as Internet Explorer. As developers would expect, some popular open source JavaScript frameworks can already be used in the context of a Windows Store application, like backbone.js, Knockout.JS, YUI. You can learn more about how to build a Windows 8 app with YUI in this YUI blog from Jeff Burtoft, HTML5 evangelist for Microsoft.

Windows 8 provides access to all the WinRT APIs within the HTML5 development environment. Developers should be aware that there are some additional security features to consider when developing Windows 8 applications or HTML5-based cross platform applications for Windows. You can learn more about these features on MSDN.

jQuery paves the way for open source JavaScript frameworks use in Windows Store applications

According to the buildwith.com site, jQuery is the most widely used JavaScript framework on the Web. This makes it even more exciting that jQuery 2.0 will fully support Windows Store applications as this will benefit developers who already use jQuery and also demonstrates how other JavaScript frameworks can be integrated into the Windows 8 application model.

“The jQuery team is excited about the new environments where jQuery 2.0 can be used. HTML and JavaScript developers want to take their jQuery knowledge with them to streamline the development process wherever they work. jQuery 2.0 gives them the ability to do that in Windows 8 Store applications. We appreciate the help from appendTo for both its patches and testing of jQuery 2.0 and MS Open Tech for its technical support.” — Dave Methvin, president, jQuery Foundation

appendTo, long-time JavaScript and Web development experts and jQuery contributors, extended its expertise to the Windows 8 application development, working with the jQuery community with technical support from MS Open Tech to enable jQuery support for the Windows 8 application model.

“While jQuery meets the language criterion for Windows Store applications, Windows 8 exposes all the WinRT APIs within the HTML5 development environment, which comes with a new security model that made some code and common practices of jQuery flagged as unsafe in the context of a Windows Store application. AppendTo reviewed and re-authored portions of jQuery core to bring it into alignment with the Windows security model, as well as identified key areas where alternative patterns would need to be substituted for actually-used conventions.” — Jonathan Sampson, director of Support for appendTo.

appendTo submitted code directly to the jQuery Core project, which will integrate this support, and the alternative patterns mentioned by Sampson were submitted to the net.tuts+ site to help jQuery developers understand the Windows 8 security model and easily build Windows 8 applications using jQuery. You can read appendTo’s blog post with more details on this work.

Although these patterns apply to the jQuery framework, most of them transfer to all JavaScript frameworks and will definitely help you if you are planning to use your favorite open source JavaScript framework to build Windows 8 applications.

Mobile cross platform development frameworks and tools

HTML5 is now supported on all modern mobile platforms and open source tools such as Apache Cordova (aka PhoneGap), allowing developers to publish their applications built with HTML5 and JavaScript to multiple platforms with minimal effort and maximum code reuse. As in all HTML5/JavaScript development, developers love to be able to use their favorite frameworks, to help with their MVC model, database, UI or simply JavaScript code structure.

Developers can already use some of these mobile cross-platform development frameworks and tools on Microsoft Devices as we mentioned in a previous post about Windows Phone 8 support added to popular open source tools and frameworks. MS Open Tech continuously engages with open source communities (contributing code, providing technical support, getting developers early access to future versions of the platforms, helping with testing devices, etc.), and we’ve found that developers are eager to publish their HTML5 apps to Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Stores.

"At HP IT, we use Enyo to build apps for conference attendees. Our Enyo-based conference apps deliver a first-class user experience on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 — not to mention iOS, Android and a host of other platforms. The ability to serve users across platforms and device types with a single app is a huge win for us." — Sharad Mathur, sr. director, Software, Architecture & Business Intelligence Printing & Personal Systems HP IT

Here are some recent notable developments in HTML5 mobile cross platform development:

If you are an HTML5 and JavaScript developer, you should definitely consider building Windows 8 applications leveraging not only your development experience and skills but also your existing JavaScript code and libraries. Take a look at the jQuery new patterns proposed by appendTo, and start coding for Windows — who knows, you might be sitting on the next Cut the Rope!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2013
    Very great!

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2013
    KnockoutJS may be usable with Win8, but the Visual Studio automated Store build tests fail with it, thus the question has anyone been able to publish such an app?

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2013
    @Dada can you please send me a direct email (using the "email blog author" link on the right) so we can look into the issue you are facing and help you out? Thanks

  • Olivier