New Open Source jQuery Globalization Plugin Released

by Peter Galli on June 15, 2010 09:25am

Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's Developer Division, has announced on his blog that a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin has been released to the community as open source.

The plugin, which works with the jQuery JavaScript library and is supported in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, lets globalization support be added to JavaScript applications, and includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian and Japanese to Canadian English. 

You can download the prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from the Github repository here, and download a set of samples that demonstrate some simple use-cases with it here.

"The jQuery Globalization plugin enables you to easily parse and format numbers, currencies, and dates for different cultures in JavaScript. You also can use the Globalization plugin to format dates so that the day and month appear in the right order and the day and month names are correctly translated. The plugin uses the language tags defined in the RFC 4646 and RFC 5646 standards to identity cultures," Guthrie said in his blog post.

The release of this latest plugin follows the news last month that Microsoft was starting to make code contributions to jQuery and the first code contributions it was working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support.

"I'm excited about our continuing participation in the jQuery community. This Globalization plugin is the third jQuery plugin that we've released. We've really appreciated all of the great feedback and design suggestions on the jQuery templating and data-linking prototypes that we released earlier this year.  We also want to thank the jQuery and jQuery UI teams for working with us to create these plugins," Guthrie said.