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The jQuery project announced that both Microsoft and Nokia have decided to bundle the open source jQuery Ajax framework with their products. Specifically, Microsoft will bundle jQuery with their development platform, VisualStudio, and Nokia will bundle jQuery with its WebKit-based runtime on mobile phones.
This exposes jQuery, already one of the most popular Ajax frameworks, to two large communities of developers. The Microsoft VisualStudio developers who develop .NET applications including ASP.NET is very large. I would guesstimate its 2 - 3 million maybe more. The Nokia development community is certainly smaller but its the largest of all the mobile phone application development platforms (about 40% of the mobile phones that ship today are Nokia phones).
In addition, the end-user audiences for Microsoft and Nokia are huge. Even if jQuery is used only in combination with ASP.NET it would still be available to tens of thousands of web sites and millions of web surfers. Nokia's impact, in terms of end-users, is even larger. The total cell phone market is over 3 billion subscribers meaning that the potential exposure to end-users for jQuery could be in the 1/2 billion range (only a subset of Nokia phones offer browsers).
To be perfectly frank, I never imagined any of the Ajax frameworks getting this kind of traction from such large developer communities. The Ajax landscape is divided into hundreds of small and large open source projects - 240 by my last count a year ago. Prototype and script.aculo.us have maintained a strong lead but it's been eroding over the past 18 months.
In conjunction with Burton Group and Ajaxian.com I ran three surveys between 2005 and 2007 of Ajax developers to find out which Ajax frameworks they were using. The first survey, in October of 2005, found that Prototype had 23% of the mind share with script.aculo.us, which layers over Prototype, as a close second. In September of 2006 Prototype lead by about 48%. In December of 2007, prototype still lead with 33% but jQuery has risen almost out of nowhere to 25%.
After Prototype and Script.aculo.us the other Ajax frameworks have jostled for position over time leaving no clear indication of who were to be the "also rans". For example, in 2006 the top 3 frameworks after Prototype and Scrip.aculo.us were DWR, Dojo, and ASP.NET. In 2007 it was Dojo, DWR, and Moo.fx. In 2007 it was Ext JS, jQuery, and Dojo. This lead me to believe that picking a winner in the Ajax market was difficult at best.
Is it possible that the Microsoft and Nokia bundling of jQuery will put that framework into a permanent lead over Prototype? Only time will tell. How does Flex, Silverlight, Curl and JavaFX stack up? Who knows! Another survey needs to be run for 2008 to determine where the mind-share is today. Stay tunned!
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At Zoho, we are pretty excited about jQuery and the overall pace of innovation in Javascript. I don't intend this as a slight on Flash/AIR, which is a great technology, but the direction where all of this is heading is becoming clearer by the day: Javascript wins. Fast Javascript VMs, a wide selection of excellent JS libraries, and HTML 5 are all pointing in the direction of what I would call "browser native rich applications". Fighting this tide is pointless.
http://blogs.zoho.com/uncategorized/firefox-31-google-chrome-javascript-wins-flashsilverlight-lose/
"Fighting this tide is pointless."
Like something of that nature has never been said before by someone supporting their favorite technology.
I'm confused by your Flash/AIR comment. The Flash part I suppose I get but the AIR part is strange since that technology itself offers Javascript based development outside of the browser. And unless I'm mistaken you can use jQuery for that development.
To me Javascript will be unable to reach its full potential until the same code works across all browsers and the IE6 holdouts FINALLY upgrade to a modern browser.
I've always felt that most technologies have their place and often do not compete with each other. I do not feel that Javascript and Flash are strict competitors because I see each has their place depending on the intended outcome of the project. And based on what I see of the future of the two technologies I don't think my attitude will change anytime soon.