[SMW-devel] Including jQuery in SMW

[Yaron K. <ya...@gm...>]

Hi,

As some of you know, I'm mentoring a project, with Sanyam Goyal doing the
main work, of transitioning Semantic MediaWiki and some of its spinoff
extensions to use jQuery, the Javascript library that is set to become the
standard for MediaWiki. To that end, we want to add jQuery into SMW itself,
so that there's a standard version and set of files that all the extensions
use, and so that wikis don't have to go out to the internet to get the code
(like they usually do with YUI at this point, for some extensions). This
would involve adding just two files to SMW's /libs directory: one for jQuery
and one for jQuery UI, a very standard sister library for jQuery that
provides a set of helpful effects and widgets, like autocompletion:

http://jqueryui.com/

Here are the two files that would need to be added (presumably the minimized
form is better):

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.1/jquery-ui.min.js

...and here are the two non-minimized files, if you're curious:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.js
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.1/jquery-ui.js

I thought this would be a good time to add it, since SMW 1.5.1 is set to be
released fairly soon.

At some point, MediaWiki itself will include jQuery, so these files will
become increasingly unnecessary; but such a version hasn't been released
yet, and it'll be a long time before most people are using it.

Any thoughts/objections?

-Yaron