Does a policy prohibiting jQuery in Enterprise applications make sense?

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Does a policy prohibiting jQuery in Enterprise applications make sense?

I just don’t get it, I actually couldn’t believe it at first; what possible justification would there be for the all-out prohibition of jQuery within an Enterprise? Believe it or not, this is actually happening, on the doorsteps of 2011, and in larger numbers than I would’ve imagined.

Whatever the case may be, here’s an ironclad top 10 list of why avoiding jQuery is a costly mistake:

It’s far and away the most popular and fastest growing JavaScript library on the planet [2]
It’s arguably the safest, most scrutinized library of its kind with no open vulnerabilities
It’s more pervasive than IIS itself – in use by > 28% of all websites on the internet [2] [3]
Even the US government uses it at Whitehouse.gov [2]
It’s distributed freely across the globe through both MS and Google CDN edge-servers [2]
Microsoft has committed to help with QA testing and code development. It also includes jQuery as part of Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC [2]; on top of that, Microsoft ‘now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits’ [5]
Nokia is contributing with testing and has also hired one of the core developers, Brandon Aaron [2]
It supports browsers from virtually a decade ago – everything from IE6 and FF2 onward [1]
jQuery solutions are far more supportable than their raw-JavaScript counterparts
Forcing enterprise developers to hand-roll JavaScript is not a solution, just a costlier, more error-prone and less-secure alternative