There are rumours floating around that jQuery will be included as part of SharePoint 2010, but I can’t get any confirmation from anyone.

Will Lawrence of the jPoint Codeplex Team commented on another article I wrote, jQuery for Everyone: The SharePoint Game Changer, and I thought it would be beneficial to expose his comment to a wider audience.

From Will Lawrence:

I am not so sure that jQuery is included as part of SharePoint 2010. Yes, it is integrated into Visual Studio 2010 in so far as intellisense and jQuery is provided in a local folder post install. However, in all the demos I saw at SPC09, jQuery had been downloaded to a SharePoint library or folder and referenced via traditional means (i.e. script tag hack or document.write method, or as HTML ).

After a Microsoft Presentation on SharePoint Mashups with Bing Maps, I asked the question on what is the recommended method to include jQuery on SharePoint pages and the answer was there is no best method. I caught up with Mike Amerlan later at the conference and he did say that deploying jQuery and script solutions via WSP is the best way to go.

I still think the best way to go for now is to use Jan Tielen’s SmartTools.jQuery (server side install which adds jQuery to all pages in a site collection) or his new jQueryLoader (client side install which modifies the master page to include jQuery on all site pages).

The community still needs a better solution. We need a way to:

- Push the script to pages that we want.
- Allow Script on Demand or lazy loading (it’s a waste of resources to load jQuery and other libraries on a page that don’t need it).

I am going to have the jPoint community look into implementing this, possibly by using an Aspect Oriented Programming design.

From Mark Miller:

Thanks Will. This is definitely worth following. Last week I utilized a SharePoint Wiki in WSS as a SharePoint Scripting Resource Center (SSRC) at the top of a site collection so that I could standardize clientside scripting access across the site collection. If jQuery is added to the basic SharePoint 2010 installation, my solution is nothing more than a place holder for a year or two.

However, if what you are saying is correct, the SSRC is going to be critical resource for those using jQuery to enhance the SharePoint interface. I will make the template available within the next few weeks to those inerested.