Ajax Girl

Jack Slocum is one of the best evangelists of YUI (in our opinion) as he gets cool stuff out there that uses YUI. Some of his newer features are not YUI-specific so his YUI-EXT project will become Ext, and will support other libraries.

One of the fruits of this new world is the partnership announced jQuery & Ext Partner to Deliver Integrated JavaScript & UI which details how Ext 1.0 will support jQuery as well as YUI:

The most mature User Interface library for web applications will soon support jQuery, the two projects announced today.

Ext, a group of renowned User Interface components including a tree view, live grid, dual-panel layout among others, previously worked as an extension to the YUI library. Beginning with version 1.0 of Ext, it will work as an extension to jQuery as well, allowing jQuery users to leverage the power of the user interface tools available in Ext with the lightweight core library and expressive syntax of the best library for unobtrusive DOM scripting.

“We’re really excited by this collaboration. Ext is a fantastic library, and being able to provide it as an official jQuery Plugin is a huge win for everyone involved,” said John Resig, the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library.

What prompted the collaboration?

Ext has some fantastic components - arguably, the best on the web.

jQuery has all the core functionality to support what Ext provides, with a far smaller core file-size than YUI. The jQuery team contacted Jack Slocum with the hopes that we could work together to make Ext work with jQuery, and Jack wholeheartedly agreed. It’s a win-win situation: jQuery gets some awesome components, and Ext gets a huge influx of new users.

What are the benefits for jQuery and Ext users?

jQuery users get a huge number of expertly-designed components that they will be able to deploy immediately. Additionally, they’ll be able to use them in a manner that better suits the jQuery philosophy (e.g. leveraging jQuery’s unobtrusive philosophy, being able to call Ext queries on sets of elements, chaining calls, etc.) Additionally, jQuery is also investigating the possibility of supporting the use of DomQuery, Ext’s selector engine, as an alternative to jQuery’s CSS Selector code.

At the same time, existing Ext users will gain the flexibility of being able to continue to use Ext’s professional caliber components while leveraging the lightweight, small (~19k) and powerful jQuery framework.

This is good news for all. It also shows how plugged in jQuery is to the community to get this worked out with Jack.

We can’t wait to see the full Ext 1.0 and beyond.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jack-slocum-of-ext-to-support-jquery