Microsoft has unveiled Internet Explorer 9 platform preview, including expanded support for hardware-accelerated graphics and text HTML5, and a new JavaScript engine.
The company claims that together the new offerings will allow developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich web applications that utilise modern PC hardware through a modern operating system.
Microsoft is also supporting various HTML5 specifications, including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard codecs, among others. In addition, the company also demonstrated a new JavaScript engine that uses multiple cores of chips to manage computing resources and enhance web performance.
Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of web applications. In addition, the company said that it will also work to provide interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET enabling .Net developers to better incorporate jQuery capabilities.
In addition, the company said that it will promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with products such as Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify web applications.
Microsoft also rolled out SDKs for OData, an HTTP and Atom-based approach to data portability, for various languages and platforms including .NET, Java, PHP, Objective-C and JavaScript.
In addition, the company has launched the second community technology preview (CTP) of Microsoft code-named ‘Dallas’, an information marketplace powered by the Windows Azure platform, which provides developers with access to third-party datasets that can be consumed by web and mobile applications.
