Microsoft and Nokia Adopt OSS JQuery Framework

soliptic writes "The jQuery blog today announced that 'Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform.' So the open-source javascript framework will be shipped with Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman notes: 'It's Open Source, and we'll use it and ship it via its MIT license, unchanged. If there's changes we want, we'll submit a patch just like anyone else.'" There's also a story at eWeek about the decision.

Just makes sense...

[Max Romantschuk]

Javascript frameworks deal with the major hurdles of modern web design: Abstracting browser differences, and avoiding reinventing the wheel with the kind of AJAXy effects that are increasingly more common these days.

I wonder how this will affect Prototype. It's always had different design goals than jQuery, but will this diminish it's popularity?

Also, will the jQuery API eventually be integrated into the browser instead of being a huge JS blob for every page?

Re:Will they

[Anonymous Coward]

If they follow the license and the ideals of open source are so pure than what's the problem?

Oh, that's right, it's Microsoft. That automatically makes it evil...

Give me a break.

Re:Will they fix it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to elaborate? I searched the bug tracker for http headers and Carewolf, but didn't see anything relevant, although that may be because the complete fuckwit who redesigned the website recently decided that it would be a good idea to use a font size that is half the size configured in the browser (flagged as !important no less). And no, don't tell me to adjust my settings. If I have to adjust my settings to make your design readable, then you have utterly failed as a designer on the most fundamental level. And I'm not a rock star, dickhead.

Re:pity JS is crap to start with

[Sancho]

The programming language itself has many, many problems.

• It's a fully functional language which uses a syntax almost identical to C.
• It implements the awful === operator.
• Boolean values can be True, False, Undefined, or Null (this is a side effect of being weakly typed)
• It tries to be easy to program by assuming end-of-statement operators (';') at certain places if the function wouldn't otherwise parse. This makes it incredibly difficult to debug. I truly consider this a bug in the design.
• It's a weakly typed language with a strong understanding of type. By this, I mean that any variable is actually a reference which can hold values of any type (though they're all just objects anyway.) This isn't so much a bug as a design decision, but it's important for understanding the below--
• null.typeof returns 'object'. So does Array.typeof. That's just ... dumb.
• The object which 'this' references has several different meanings depending upon the context.

So those are only a few of the issues. It feels like it's trying to be several different languages all at once. Coupled with the issues above (particularly the inconsistent use of 'this' and the implicit semi-colons), well frankly, if any design could be considered buggy, I'd say that it's Javascript's.

Re:But...

[SanityInAnarchy]

In fact, this has already happened to a Javascript library: EXTJS. Not quite in the sense you're talking about -- it was GPL'd -- but we still had to port away from it.

We might've been willing to release some of the Javascript source -- after all, GP is right, it's not like we can hide it -- but the author was claiming it applied to the web app serving the Javascript, also.

Although that's patently absurd, it's also untested in court, and it proved that he's exactly the kind of assmunch we don't want to work with. We've just finished porting everything to jQuery and MooTools. Probably better off for it.

Re:pity JS is crap to start with

[Sancho]

I guess that it depends upon your definition of "buggy." You can design a language where the Integer object has a destructor named "toString" if you want to. And if someone did that, I would consider the design to be broken.

That's an extreme case, but it illustrates the point. Javascript takes common programming paradigms, structure, and syntax, and turns them on their heads. It would be nice if the designers had chosen to make Javascript look a little less C-like, but I suppose that it might not have gotten widespread adoption (despite mostly being used incorrectly due to the syntax).

The real key is that in Javascript, you can say that you want something, and you get something different from what you want. I'm harping on the typeof "bug" because it's the most obvious. I have an object of type Array. I ask Javascript for the typeof that object. I get returned object. Ok. I have an object of type Integer. I ask Javascript for the typeof that object. I get returned Integer. The lack of internal consistency there should be considered a bug.

Same thing here..

[Junta]

Was evaluating JS frameworks for an open-source project, and ext js was precluded due to license. The project was BSD licensed, and thus neither the commercial nor GPL license was appropriate.

I understand their viewpoint (trying to make a business and community framework), but MIT licensed jQuery is much more amenable to other licenses.

I've always thought software vendors when doing open source would prefer GPL on stuff they put out (force commercial adopters to use a more commercial license), and that software vendors leeching on the community prefer BSD (lower obligation on them).

Re:pity JS is crap to start with

[Anonymous Coward]

<historyLesson>

null.typeof returns 'object'

This was a bug. The original implementation used tagged pointers and the tag bits for objects were zeroes. Null was also represented by zero. The typeof method forgot to treat null as a special case so, coincidentally, the type came out as object. Netscape tried to change this (and various other bugs) when ECMA standardized the language, but MS (who'd done an almost perfect job of reverse engineering the language) insisted on backwards compatibility.

</historyLesson>