Frameworks
It's a Trap!
Microsoft sets aside a plan to craft its own jQuery alternative to adopt the open source JavaScript library instead.
One of my favorite lines from the original Star Wars Trilogy comes during the "Return of the Jedi," when the rebel fleet is surprised to learn that the Imperial Death Star they came to destroy is, in fact, fully armed. As the giant battle station begins blasting ships with its planet-cracking death ray, the amphibious Rebel Admiral Ackbar shouts: "It's a trap!"
You can forgive a lot of developers, Redmond Developer News readers among them, if they felt a bit like Admiral Ackbar when Microsoft began its interoperability push in earnest a couple years back. Indeed, at every turn Ackbar's clarion warning has been sounded by open source and suspicious-minded .NET developers alike.
Microsoft inks a partnership with Linux vendor Novell? It's a trap! Microsoft promotes OOXML as an Ecma and then ISO standard? It's a trap! Microsoft issues its interoperability pledge and publishes thousands of pages of detailed API and protocol documentation? It's a trap!
But when Microsoft DevDiv chief Scott Guthrie announced that the company was integrating the open source jQuery language into Visual Studio, it was hard to see where the trap lay.
jQuery is a lightweight and simple JavaScript library that enables interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It provides a way for developers to efficiently select and animate HTML operations, and is an intriguing tool for AJAX-bound Web developers. Remarkably, Microsoft actually set aside a plan to craft its own jQuery alternative to adopt the open source JavaScript library instead.
Guthrie was refreshingly candid in his blog account: "Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it?"
This is vintage Guthrie. DotNetNuke founder Shaun Walker, in an interview we published in our Sept. 1 issue, credited Guthrie for reaching out to his nascent open source Web application framework effort as part of a larger effort to drive .NET adoption in 2001. Today, DotNetNuke is the most popular .NET-based open source project on the Web.
Industry analyst Peter O'Kelly says Guthrie is "just a developer's developer. He's hardcore about it."
Reader Shawn Mehaffie would agree. He writes: "This is great news and just goes to prove that Scott Guthrie and his team are one of many Microsofties that do get what open source can mean to them. At this time I cannot find any fault with this decision by Scott, and I applaud him for making this decision. You have to assume that there were those at Microsoft that did not like this decision."
Perhaps so. But there's definitely a lot to like about Guthrie's management from the perspective of .NET developers. Maybe just this once, the good Admiral Ackbar can rest easy.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.