Juice UI is appendTo’s modern equivalent to the Ajax Control Toolkit. The Ajax Control Toolkit served a great purpose for its time, but its time is coming to an end! Juice UI offers developers a great option to migrate to jQuery UI with ease. The controls will feel familiar to anyone who has used the Ajax Control Toolkit. And we can attest that moving from Microsoft Ajax to jQuery UI as a framework is a big win with tremendous benefits.
Just like we realized with Wijmo, appendTo decided that jQuery UI was a great foundation to build on in JavaScript. They have fully adopted jQuery UI by making ASP.NET controls and extenders for the widgets shipped with jQuery UI.
We followed a very similar pattern here at ComponentOne when creating Wijmo. We built it on jQuery UI as a pure client-side UI kit. Then we extended our Wijmo widgets as ASP.NET Controls and Extenders in ASP.NET Web Forms. We could not be happier with this decision to move from MS Ajax to jQuery UI and our customers will tell you the same. For that reason, we’re so excited to see appendTo and Microsoft going in the same direction.