Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Bertrand Le Roy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:51:46 GMT

@Oskar: awesome, but you should add var in front of that c to avoid a warning in strict mode.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Oskar Austegard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:47:49 GMT

#twitcode version of Bertrand's exposeTojQuery function:

c=Sys.Component;c.$it=function(t,pn){return jQuery.fn[pn]=function(p){return this.each(function(){c.create(t,p,{},{},this);});}}

;-)

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Andrew Webb — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:18:13 GMT

It's important to bear in mind that not everyone uses jQuery. We started off with the intention to use it, but ended up with ExtJs for our current web app because of its far more mature widgets (check out the grid), which you can find all in one place. No hunting around the plugin-o-sphere.

ExtJs has 45 localization files, but they mainly contain localized resource strings for the widgets. There's limited support for formatting a date for display, and no support for formatting a floating point number (AFAICS). Compare this with MS AJAX's globalization files, which give you great support for formatting and parsing dates and numbers in 205 different cultures. Most of our formatting for display takes place on the server, but occasionally we need the client-side globalization support (e.g. for formatting numbers that the user enters into the editable ExtJs grid).

So if Bertrand and team are going to keep globalization (and other useful parts of MS AJAX) separate from jQuery, and applicable to both jQuery and other JavaScript libraries, I can only applaud.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Bertrand Le Roy — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:14:10 GMT

@Hamza: I'm really just experimenting here, but we're talking about four lines of code here. This shouldn't be too risky to use in your next project. Just ping me if you have any problem with it.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Hamza — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:56:43 GMT

Really great stuff here. Nice work guys but can i know when this will ship or be mature enough to be used in production. I really want to use it in my next project.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Bertrand Le Roy — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:32:48 GMT

@Karl: if you're going to build a real client application that uses the browser as more than a dumb terminal, you're going to handle data on the client. On the wire, the data should be culture-neutral, which means that the client needs strong globalization capabilities. The built-in JavaScript support is just lame and US-centric. We had a long thread on Dave Ward's post on date handling.

For data services, sure they are JSON, but that's beside the point. With Microsoft Ajax, you can just point at a data service and poof, you have automatic change tracking on the client and can send those back by just calling save. It doesn't get any easier, which some people value.

Using jQuery *you* can build your own plugin faster. Good for you. About plugins.jquery.com, there are some real gems over there, I'm not the one who's going to say otherwise. But there is also a lot of junk, and it's mostly unsupported and unsupportable. Discovering the good ones takes time (despite the rating system: the organization of the catalog is showing signs of weakness under the load) and not everyone can afford that. Believe it or not, there are people who prefer to pay for a guaranteed level of quality and support. I would tend to be more on the side of exploring, building and using jQuery plugins myself for many things because that's the way my brain is wired but I know for a fact that this is not representative of the whole user base for ASP.NET.

So for *you* it's not about bloat and size (although you just said "using jQuery you can build your own plugin quicker than you can download those 'professional' third-party components" so apparently it is, at least a little bit). Apparently, for the very brave "WHY 2" it is: "the .net ajax is so bloated". So it's about streamlining. Sure. You streamline your applications the way you want (with jQuery), we streamline our framework and provide cool new features for our users to streamline their own applications. At least we try. Adapting? We adopted jQuery instead of building our own. How's that for adapting?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Sometimes it seems like you would only be satisfied if Microsoft stopped all software development. I'm afraid this is not going to happen.

@Ewschone: that's an interesting idea, but it's actually already done, in a way. The Microsoft Ajax library contains all globalization files, which are perfectly fine to use with any other library. In 4.0, we also split our library into much smaller pieces so that you can pick just the pieces that you need. I'm not sure it's very interesting to tie those pieces onto the jQuery object (it's actually a few lines of code but what's the value really?). jQuery is mainly about DOM manipulation. Globalization is a little orthogonal to that. I'm really not sure there's much value in grafting globalization on it. But I'm absolutely open to any arguments you may have and as we're precisely exploring ways we can contribute to the jQuery ecosystem I'm really willing to listen to what you'd have to say about that.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Karl — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:34:47 GMT

Do you guys set aside a day of the week to justify the work you do? Globalization? Is that how people are dong it these days? Via javascript? Huh...

Data Services return JSON, why do you need msAjax for that?

Using jQuery you can build your own plugin quicker than you can download those "professional" third-party components. Or you know, you can just goto plugins.jquery.com

It isn't about size or bloat, but about continuing to put effort into outdated and inferior solutions (and dragging countless developers down with you). Its about streamlining and adapting.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

bcardiff — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:13:44 GMT

Just nice. Between this and the my previous work on <a href="weblogs.manas.com.ar/.../">Declarative jQuery (with Microsoft Ajax)</a> we are able to go from one side to the other :-) letting users of either libraries use the components of the other one with less effort.

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

ewschone — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:08:36 GMT

If the globalization etc is indeed so good, then why not contribute to jquery ?

re: Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Andrew Webb — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:22:44 GMT

For us, globalization is sooo important. Every date and number that is displayed to the user must be formatted according to the browser's preferred language. Some of this formatting we do in web methods, but some formatting must be done client-side. The MS AJAX 3.5 library is so good at this (although naturally it doesn't have as full a range of formatting options as the .NET Framework itself).

Don't know how the 4.0 library will do it, but I've written up how to enable script globalization in MS AJAX 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC apps here:-

stackoverflow.com/.../what-about-script-globalization-of-microsoftajax-js-in-asp-net-mvc