Update on the Microsoft jQuery Plugins

A little over a six months ago we blogged about the work that Microsoft was doing with jQuery plugins (jQuery Templates, Globalization, and Data Link). This post provides a little more information on the current status and on the plans for those plugins.

Over the past six months, as the jQuery and Microsoft teams have worked on the plugins, we've decided together that the richness and power of these plugins makes it important to develop them in the context of a strong relationship with a collaborative sub-team within jQuery.

To facilitate this, the jQuery team has announced some changes in the way plugins are managed. Each plugin will now be owned by a sub-team within the jQuery Project, such as the jQuery UI team or the jQuery Core Dev team.

When jQuery 1.5 shipped earlier this year, you might have wondered why jQuery Templates was not part of that release. The jQuery announcement clarifies this -- jQuery Templates is a key part of jQuery functionality, but it will nonetheless continue as a separate plugin in jQuery UI rather than shipping as part of jQuery Core.

This is a continuation of the investment that Microsoft is making in jQuery and jQuery UI. Our investment isn't limited to the plugins I just mentioned. For example, another important investment has been the new jQuery UI Grid project that we've provided support for at many levels. We're now shipping both jQuery and jQuery UI in our newer products, and we plan to have great support in ASP.NET for developers who want to use the jQuery UI Grid in their projects.

Moving forward, we'll continue to be involved in the design and development of jQuery Templates. This includes our contributions to the grid project, since the jQuery UI Grid is using the jQuery Templates plugin. Microsoft will also continue to work on Data Linking and its integration with jQuery Templates. We'll move that work to its own source repository, plus we'll take ownership of the documentation.

We think these changes are a valuable step towards helping the Microsoft and jQuery teams and the community to move these plugins towards RTM quality and to ship them as great V1 products!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 17, 2011
  jQuery Data Linking is not going to be "owned" by jQuery Core or jQuery UI, but jQuery Templates will be? If jQuery Data Linking loses momentum, client side databinding with Js will unfortunately remain less than obvious to approach in solutions today.  KnockoutJs, Data Linking, datajs, Backbone are all quite different, and hard to know which one to standardise on for working projects.

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2011
  @Andy B. I don't believe that this means Data Linking will lose momentum. That is what the linked repository is about: github.com/.../jsviews. It is for ongoing work integrating jQuery Templates and Data Link. The preview that is there now is already a big step in that direction. In fact the presentation I just gave at the jQuery Conference included showing a preview of that ongoing work...   events.jquery.org/.../schedule www.slideshare.net/.../harness-jquery-templates-and-data-link

• Anonymous
  May 09, 2011
  Im a bit confused. So were do we look to get the latest jquery template. jquery UI or the repoistory at git.

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2011
  Boris, there's talk in numerous places about a beta 2 of jquery-template? Is there anything that describes the differences between beta-1 and beta-2? Is a preview of beta-2 available anywhere?

• Anonymous
  May 08, 2012
  gotta a sample to run thru which says download jQuery.Templates thru NuGet in VS.Net 2010 don't see that, just some beta v.0.1 release....  8^P