I am super excited to see that our Windows Azure team is pushing out updates frequently. Note that we recently (like couple of weeks ago) announced Android support for Windows Azure Mobile Services. And now we have the bunch of new updates including HTML/JS support for Windows Azure Mobile Services, HDInsight -to deploy Hadoop on Azure Clusters as well as ability to fetch source code from Mercurial and deployment from DropBox to Azure Web Sites.

Following is a quick summary for HTML/JS client support for Windows Azure Mobile Services.

Today Scott Guthrie announced HTML client support for Windows Azure Mobile Services such that developers can begin using Windows Azure Mobile Services to build both HTML5/JS Websites and Apache Cordova/PhoneGap apps.

The two major changes in this update include:

• New Mobile Services HTML client library that supports IE8+ browsers, current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, plus PhoneGap 2.3.0+.  It provides a simple JavaScript API to enable both the same storage API support we provide in other native SDKs and easy user authentication via any of the four supported identity providers – Microsoft Account, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support to enable your Mobile Service to accept cross-domain Ajax requests. You can now configure a whitelist of allowed domains for your Mobile Service using the Windows Azure management portal.

With this update Windows Azure Mobile Services now provides a scalable turnkey backend solution for your Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and HTML5/JS applications.

To learn more about the new HTML client library for Windows Azure Mobile Services please see checkout the new HTML tutorials on WindowsAzure.com and the following short 4 minute video where Yavor Georgiev demonstrates how to quickly create a new mobile service, download the HTML client quick start app, run the app and store data within the Mobile Service then configure a custom domain with Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=287040

If you have any questions please reach out to us via dedicated Windows Azure Mobile Services our forum.

Call to action: Visit WindowsAzure.com, build your first HTML app using Mobile Services using the HTML Quick Start project in the Windows Azure portal, and find tutorials in the Mobile Services dev center.  Windows Azure Mobile Services are still free for your first 10 applications running on shared instances.