This week jQuery makes two huge announcements, Fiat uses AIR to work with drivers, Silverlight plays Flash Video, YUI releases a new milestone, the Flash Player learns to talk to C, and much more all on this week's Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: jQuery Moves to Lead of the Ajax Pack

The news broke last week just after I finished writing the RoundUp, that jQuery had been adopted on two different platforms. First, Nokia will now bundle jQuery with their Web Runtime. This means that jQuery will be deployed on thousands of new handsets.

The second and biggest announcement is that jQuery will now be distributed with Visual Studio, and Microsoft is working to bring deep integration between several key services and jQuery. Here is a brief summary by John Resig on the jQuery official blog:

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they're looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

With this move, I think it is certain that jQuery has moved to the front of the Ajax pack. While other frameworks will certainly have their niche markets, I believe that jQuery is now the de facto Ajax standard. What do you think?

jQuery.com: jQuery, Microsoft, and Nokia

Scott Guthrie (Microsoft): jQuery and Microsoft

Fiat Using AIR to Connect Drivers to Their Cars

Fiat recently released a new AIR application that allows you to view your driving habits and statistics. Your car records the data onto a USB drive, and that data can be loaded and viewed by an AIR application on your computer. This is one of the most ingenious uses of AIR to date. The technology is only available on certain Fiat models.

Andrew Shorten (Adobe): Fiat launches AIR app that understands how you drive your car

Flash Video in Silverlight

MonoChrome recently demoed a new product, mono.flv, which allows Silverlight to play Flash video through a server extension for IIS7. This was initially demoed at ReMIX '08 in Brighton. This gives Silverlight support for Flash Video now, instead of waiting for the next version of Silverlight (which will include h.264 support).

MonoChrome.co.uk: New Demo Video of Flash Video in Silverlight

MonoChrome.co.uk: Don't Want to Wait for Silverlight 3 to Get Your FLV Support?

FlaCC: Lightning Fast C Code in the Flash Player

FlaCC is a project from Adobe that allows you to compile C and C++ libraries into code usable by the Flash Player (ActionScript bytecode). This has huge potential for Flash, Flex, and AIR. The second link below lists a video from Scott Petersen of Adobe (the main developer of FlaCC) that explains some of the performance gains when using FlaCC. Initial tests showed some code running 50% faster when using the C code over ActionScript.

Peter Elst: More information on FlaCC

llvm.org: Video and Slides from 2008 LLVM Developers Meeting

YUI 2.6.0 Released

Yahoo released the final version of YUI 2.6.0 this week. This version includes several new features including a Carousel Control and the Paginator Control. The release notes also state that there have been over 450 fixes and enhancements. The official release post also states that this version ships with over 290 functional examples. Version 2.6.0 can be downloaded today from the YUI Developer Site.

YUIBlog.com: YUI 2.6.0 Released

Download YUI 2.6.0

Ajaxian: YUI 2.6.0 Released: Carousels, Paginators, and lots of examples

JStORM - JavaScript ORM Layer

Ajaxian announced this week that Uriel Katz is writing a completely new ORM layer entitled JStORM that is designed to work with Google Gears, Aptana Jaxer, and Adobe AIR. While this is still in an alpha state, its promised feature set is quite impressive. The post from Ajaxian gives sample code as well as a link to Uriel's announcement.

Ajaxian: JStORM: A New JavaScript Object-Relational Mapper

Ryan Stewart and Matt Chotin on Flex 4

In the first of a series of Tech Talks for AdobeTV, Ryan Stewart interviewed Matt Chotin to discuss some of the new features in Flex 4. In addition to addressing many general topics of Flex 4, the video also includes an intro to FXG, the declarative graphics framework for Flex 4.

Ryan Stewart (Adobe): Flex 4 Sneak Peak - My First Interview for Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart

AdobeTV: Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart - Flex 4 Sneak Peek

Develop Silverlight Applications for Free

One of the new features included with Silverlight 2 RC0 (which we covered last week) is the ability to create Silverlight applications with Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1. Since this is free, this means that there is a now a free path to developing Silverlight applications. Bill Reiss provides links and basic instructions on getting started in his post below.

Bill Reiss: You can now write Silverlight apps in Visual Web Developer Express

Read more from David Tucker.