I had a great twitter discussion today with @bsimser & @sympmarc about SharePoint and jQuery which was triggered by an End User SharePoint post by @sympmarc. I pointed them to my “jQuery: The SharePoint band aid” and @bsimser came back with well does jQuery enhancements in SharePoint count as development? So here’s my opinion on this:

Are jQuery enhancements development? YES!

jQuery is a JavaScript library which is executed on runtime within the client browser. People may say that because it isn’t compiled code, such as C#/VB.NET, that it is not development. Well that is not true, JavaScript is a programming language and can be debugged using tools such as Visual Studio 2008 or Firebug.

People may compare JavaScript to XHTML markup because they can write it in SharePoint Designer with no hassles or even worse straight into a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP). There is a huge difference between XTHML and JavaScript because XTHML is a declarative language whereas JavaScript is a programmatic langauge. It is like comparing CAML markup (declarative) to SharePoint API calls (programmatic).

Should we be letting or even encouraging “End Users” (or as Microsoft tags them “Information Workers”)? I do not think so. One of the big things I raised back in the original article was that JavaScript can be used to manipulate the user interface, but this relies on the user interface XTHML markup staying the same.
Well guess what? #SP2010 is just around the corner and there’s a big fat ribbon and “accessible” markup coming…which means that anything the “enhancements” currently manipulate won’t exist in the new one. This means that all those “quick fixes” will all break and migration to #SP2010 will be a…well…absolute bloody nightmare! And it serves them all right!

Most of the “enhancements” can be done via Solution Packages and the ones that can’t shouldn’t be done at all for that sole reason of upgradeability. In an uncontrolled environment you can’t use JavaScript because lots of Organisations disable JavaScript so even investing the time in this approach may mean that it doesn’t work.

To finish my point…I’ll put a beer on the fact that anyone “End User” that has used JavaScript in their SharePoint environments at some point has hit a brick wall and guess what they did…they went and got help from a developer who knows what they’re doing. Case closed.