Standardizing on AJAX

In the last issue of SPTechReport, we asked readers to write in with questions about facets of SharePoint that most interested them. In response came this letter from Jim Greenway, SharePoint admin (among other things) at T.D. Williamson Inc.: “I wasn’t able to attend the unveiling of SharePoint 2010 [at SPC in Las Vegas] so I’m really in the dark about some of its capabilities. I have heard, with SharePoint 2010 and the use of Java code, that Microsoft was standardizing on AJAX with little or no support for 3rd party tools such as MooTools. I haven’t been able to confirm this. I would like to see something around what Microsoft’s standards are when it comes to code such as Java. A lot of the functional pieces of our external web site, which was built in SharePoint, were developed using MooTools.“
Scott Jamison, formerly of Microsoft’s SharePoint team and now at SharePoint consultancy Jornata, responded: “Microsoft is absolutely standardizing on AJAX for the OOB UI in SharePoint 2010. However, developers will still need to 'pick a library' when it comes to developing for SharePoint. And MooTools will still be relevant for developing UI elements.”
And Microsoft MVP Dennis Bottjer of SpringPoint Technologies elaborated: “Basically, SharePoint 2010 is now enabling out-of-the box support for MS AJAX and Silverlight. Currently, MOSS 2007 supports both MS AJAX and Silverlight but many configuration steps must be performed to enable their support. SharePoint 2010 also add a new “client object model,” which is basically an AJAX Wrapper for web services. Microsoft also previously announced support for JQuery within Visual Studio 2008 and beyond, which makes MS AJAX and JQuery the logical choices for JavaScript frameworks over MooTools. Both frameworks are supported by the vendor and know to work with SharePoint. The goal should be to leverage MS AJAX as much as possible since it will be baked in and then leverage JQuery if needed to cover some gaps. JQuery is very compatible and is known to “get along” with other JavaScript frameworks such as MS AJAX.”
What other questions have cropped up since the unveiling of SharePoint 2010? Drop me a line at drubinstein@bzmedia.com.