jQuery UI 1.6rc6: Help us test!

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jQuery UI 1.6rc6 is available.

Download jQuery UI 1.6rc6
You can download the entire development bundle directly at

http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery.ui-1.6rc6.zip

This includes a default theme, as well as all the test and demo files. Or you can create a customized download of individual components

http://jqueryui.com/download/

and a custom theme at

http://jqueryui.com/themeroller

This is the final step before releasing 1.6 final tomorrow (Saturday night). Since we only have two days, we really need you help us test if there are no major blockers left we might have overseen. Please create a ticket for any issue you find on the jQuery UI bug tracker:

http://dev.jqueryui.com/ (note: requires registration)

and send a note for discussion on the jQuery UI Development mailing list as well:

http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-ui-dev

Thanks everyone, prepare for a great weekend!

jQuery Meetup in San Francisco

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There are a few jQuery guys in San Francisco this week and we thought it’d be fun to have a meetup. John Resig (Creator of jQuery), Rey Bango (Head of jQuery Evangelism Team) and Yehuda Katz (Rails Core Contributor, jQuery Team Member) will all be meeting up tomorrow night (the 29th) if you want to say ‘hi’.

More information can be found on the Upcoming.org site for the event – feel free to add yourself if you’re interested in coming:
jQuery(“#drinks”).imbibe();

jQuery 1.3.1 Released

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Welcome Digg users! You may be interested in the full jQuery 1.3 release, which just happened on the 14th. Enjoy!


This is a bug fix release for jQuery 1.3. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

There are no significant changes in 1.3.1 from 1.3 other than straight bug fixes. If you are still using jQuery 1.2.6, and looking to upgrade, please upgrade directly to this release.

Downloading

A copy of jQuery 1.3.1 is also available on Google’s CDN (feel free to copy the URL directly into your site):

If you wish to checkout the full release from the Subversion repository, you can do so by following the following instructions and checking out the source from the following location:

svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.3.1

A couple quick housekeeping notes:

Some noted in the release notes for 1.3 that we missed testing on Firefox 2, even though we still support it. This was a mistake on our part: We still support Firefox 2 and test on it prior to releases. You can see the full test suite run below.

jQuery 1.3.1

It was also noted that Safari 2 didn’t show up in the list of browsers that we tested against prior to the 1.3 release. This is correct – we are phasing out support for Safari 2 in jQuery. Considering that Safari 2 shows no appreciable market share and has been superseded by 3 separate Safari releases (3.0, 3.1, and 3.2) we no longer see a need for significant testing against that release.

Finally, a few users noticed that we no longer provide a “packed” version of jQuery (a version of jQuery run through Dean Edwards’ Packer with Base62 encoding turned on). We did this for a couple reasons:

  • Packed scripts are significantly harder to debug (even harder than minifed scripts).
  • Packed scripts aren’t able to run on all platforms without issue (such as Adobe AIR and Caja-capable environments).
  • But most importantly: Packed scripts are slower for the user than what you would get from using just minification. This may seem counter-intuitive since a packed script’s file size is smaller than a minified script but the final load time ends up being much higher (due to the decompression step it must go through). We have some data regarding the loading performance of minified scripts vs. packed scripts, for those that are interested.

The minifed copy of jQuery that we provide, run through the YUI Compressor, should be the optimal form of jQuery to use in a production environment (served using gzipping, if possible).

jQuery UI 1.6rc5 Compatible with jQuery 1.3

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jQuery UI 1.6rc5 is available.

Download jQuery UI 1.6rc5
You can download the entire development bundle directly

http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery.ui-1.6rc5.zip

This includes a default theme, as well as all the test and demo files. Or you can create a customized download of individual components

http://ui.jquery.com/download/

and a custom theme at

http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller

Be sure to grab an updated 1.6rc5 theme, if you got a theme from ThemeRoller in the last two weeks. (Also, for any users of 1.5.3, there is a link on ThemeRoller for downloading legacy themes)

Compatibility with jQuery 1.3
Thank you to the many people that helped test and contribute fixes to make this release happen. We have fixed a lot of issues in the two weeks since rc4 and the most major fix is this release is compatible with jQuery 1.3 (Happy Birthday jQuery) where 1.6rc4 was only compatible with jQuery 1.2.6. From now on, we ask that 1.6rc4 is no longer used for testing. Also, from here forward jQuery UI 1.5.3 will only support jQuery 1.2.6. And jQuery UI 1.6 will only support jQuery 1.3+
Thanks for any help you can provide to ensure this release is ready and fully compatible with jQuery 1.3. Please create a ticket for any issue you find on the jQuery UI bug tracker:

http://ui.jquery.com/bugs (note: requires registration)

and send a note for discussion on the jQuery UI Development mailing list as well:

http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-ui-dev

The current schedule is to wrap up 1.6 final by the end of next week.

jQuery 1.3 Released

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The jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone in to this release and we’re really quite proud of it.

I want to personally thank Ariel Flesler and Brandon Aaron who put a lot of work into fixing bugs and getting the release out the door.

Overview

There have been a number of major changes in jQuery 1.3, these are a few of the largest and most prominent changes.

Sizzle Selector Engine

jQuery has a brand new CSS selector engine – nicknamed Sizzle. We wanted an engine that was:

  1. Faster than our current engine for the most commonly used selectors.
  2. Fully extensible (we had to sacrifice some of our extensibility in favor of performance in past versions of jQuery).
  3. Completely standalone.

As far as performance is concerned, we’ve done quite well, coming in about 49% faster than our previous engine:

This is especially surprising considering that the engine in 1.2.6 was already pretty fast and that we gained a great deal of extensibility in the process.

One thing that became very obvious during the development of the new engine: We wanted to be able to collaborate on it with other libraries and developers. We saw an opportunity for some solid collaboration with some of the best JavaScript developers – the result of which will help users of all libraries. For this reason we made sure that Sizzle was able to work completely standalone (no dependencies).

Additionally, as a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve released the source code to Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation. We wanted a common meeting ground where everyone would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.

Right now we’re working with Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, MochiKit, and TinyMCE (and many others) on Sizzle, honing it to perfection.

Live Events

jQuery now supports “live events” – events that can be bound to all current – and future – elements. Using event delegation, and a seamless jQuery-style API, the result is both easy to use and very fast.

More information about live events can be found in the .live() documentation.

When working on live events we wanted a solution that was going to be fast and scale well. To do this we needed a selector engine designed to handle delegation element filtering (roughly speaking “does this selector match this element”). The new Sizzle selector engine blew away all of our expectations – coming in almost 30x faster than our previous solution:

By using advanced filtering techniques we’re able to bring you an event delegation solution that won’t bog down your browser and will scale to dozens or hundreds of delegations on a page at a time.

jQuery Event Object

Ariel Flesler brought some serious refactoring of the jQuery event system to jQuery 1.3. The bulk of this change came down to the new jQuery.Event object. This object completely encapsulates all of the functionality normally found in a W3C-compliant event object implementation and makes it work smoothly across all browsers.

There were a number of individual changes related to the event system, as well, and those are described in-depth later on in the event section.

HTML Injection Rewrite

All of the code related to injecting HTML into a document (such as the append, prepend, before, and after methods) has been overhauled. When we were analyzing jQuery applications we found this to be one of the most common bottlenecks – and thus was in direct need for an improvement. The functionality provided is identical to what was in previous releases of jQuery but with the added benefit of being much, much faster (about 6x faster overall):

We also overhauled the creation of DOM elements (e.g. $("<script/>")) and made it identical to calling $(document.createElement("script")) (it’s both faster and saner as a result).

Offset Rewrite

Brandon Aaron felt that a full rewrite of the .offset() method was due for 1.3. Re-written from scratch, it not only handles cross-browser issues better, but does so much faster:

Seeing an almost 3x jump in performance over the offset method in 1.2.6 this rewrite is sure to make your complex interactions go that much more smoothly.

No More Browser Sniffing

The final major feature of this release is one that you probably won’t ever see or deal directly with but it’s an important change that’ll help to make jQuery last longer and with less bugs: As of 1.3, jQuery no longer uses any form of browser/userAgent sniffing internally – and is the first major JavaScript library to do so.

Browser sniffing is a technique in which you make assumptions about how a piece of code will work in the future. Generally this means making an assumption that a specific browser bug will always be there – which frequently leads to code breaking when browsers make changes and fix bugs.

Instead we use a technique called feature detection where we simulate a particular browser feature or bug to verify its existence. We’ve encapsulated all the checks that we use in jQuery into a single object: jQuery.support. More information about it, feature detection, and what this feature provides can be found in the documentation.

It’s important to note that jQuery.browser is still in jQuery – and will be for the foreseeable future (too many plugins and pieces of code depend on it). That being said we’ve deprecated it in an attempt to encourage you – and all JavaScript developers – to seriously consider using feature detection in your code.

Upgrading

With jQuery 1.3 we attempted to minimize any large upgrade hassles – maintaining all existing public APIs. That being said, please read through the list of potentially-breaking changes to be aware of what might cause problems in your applications.

Note: Many plugins are providing updated releases to coincide with jQuery 1.3. If you’re having difficulties with a particular plugin please be sure to see if a new release has arrived. Specifically both jQuery UI and the Validation plugin have updated releases that work with jQuery 1.3.

Downloading

As usual, we provide two copies of jQuery, one minifed (we now use YUI Compressor as the default minifier) and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.3.min.js jQuery Minified (18kb gzipped)
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.3.js jQuery Regular (114kb)

Additionally, Google has provided us with a copy of jQuery hosted on their servers. This copy of jQuery is automatically minified and gzipped – and served from Google’s fast edge cache servers.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js

You can feel free to include the above URL directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.

Changes

The following are changes that were made that may have a remote possibility to cause backwards compatibility issues in your web pages.

  • The ‘@’ in [@attr] has been removed. Deprecated since 1.2 this old syntax no longer works. Simply remove the @ to upgrade.
  • Triggered events now bubble up the DOM. Unsuspecting event handlers may accidentally capture more events than they’re expecting.
  • The ready() method no longer tries to make any guarantees about waiting for all stylesheets to be loaded. Instead all CSS files should be included before the scripts on the page.
  • .isFunction is simpler now, it no longer handles some strange edge cases (in favor of simplicity and performance).
  • The order of “a, b, c” style selectors may change. Browsers that support querySelectorAll (Safari, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10+, IE 8+) will return the elements in document order, other browsers will (currently) return them in the order specified. In 1.3.2 and later release all comma-separated selectors will be returned in document order.
  • The trigger and triggerHandler methods no longer accept event objects within the data array. Instead they should be specified directly as an argument.
  • The undocumented ‘extra’ function is gone from trigger and triggerHandler functions as well.
  • The internal jQuery.event.trigger no longer returns the last item returned by a handler, instead it return true or false as per the W3C specification. You should use a jQuery.Event object to capture the specific return value.
  • You should always be sure to run your page in standards mode. There are known issues with methods not working correctly in quirks mode.
  • An old (deprecated) style of creating selector plugins has been removed. Previously you could create string-encoded plugins which were later turned into functions – this has been removed – please just create the functions directly.
  • jQuery.param(obj) execute obj’s functions instead of converting them to a String.

The following properties have been deprecated (in favor of feature detection and jQuery.support, as discussed in the Overview: jQuery.browser, jQuery.browser.version, jQuery.boxModel.

The following browsers are no longer supported: Safari 2

Performance

To measure the performance of different portions of jQuery we used a modified copy of the SlickSpeed test suite to run our tests (adapted to handle non-selector tests). The raw results for the test runs can be found below (all times in milliseconds).

We used a copy of the Yahoo home page (a representatively complex web page) and used a selection of selectors that people actually use. Targeting selectors that people currently use will help to improve the performance of both existing and future applications.

Frameworks	jQuery 1.2.6	jQuery 1.3	Dojo 1.2.3	MooTools 1.2.1	Prototype 1.6.0.3
Firefox 3	184		111		147		240		137
Firefox 3.5	113		34		105		135		55
Safari 3.2	71		15		64		76		50
Safari Nightly	46		15		65		47		18
Opera 9.6	107		75		73		132		87
IE 6		854		640		561		1611		3174
IE 7		210		181		150		490		761
Chrome		30		13		23		118		10

Delegation Filtering Tests

To test delegation filtering we attempted to see if a given element matched a selector. jQuery 1.3 and Prototype provided native methods for handling this (.is and .match, respectively) whereas jQuery 1.2.6, Dojo, and MooTools all used a “run a selector and see if an element is in the results” technique.

Frameworks	jQuery 1.2.6	jQuery 1.3	Dojo 1.2.3	MooTools 1.2.1	Prototype 1.6.0.3
Firefox 3	3260		199		1630		3798		763
Firefox 3.5	1047		113		620		1101		298
Safari 3.2	1169		91		820		1223		188
Safari Nightly	911		65		294		590		125
Opera 9.6	1764		167		898		1976		451
IE 6		22142		1201		13000		17227		12827
IE 7		4908		341		2664		5497		2994
Chrome		959		125		700		939		153

DOM Manipulation Tests

These tests analyze the performance of inserting DOM fragments (in the case of jQuery and Prototype this is HTML, for MooTools it was using their Element class). Dojo didn’t provide any explicit helpers for injecting HTML or constructing DOM elements so it was excluded.

Frameworks	jQuery 1.2.6	jQuery 1.3	MooTools 1.2.1	Prototype 1.6.0.3
Firefox 3	161		41		47		323
Firefox 3.5	113		31		42		78
Safari 3.2	77		10		25		41
Safari Nightly	87		22		22		31
Opera 9.6	130		23		36		84
IE 6		710		110		600		971
IE 7		560		60		330		460
Chrome		49		14		23		21

.offset() Tests

Ran the jQuery .offset() method on a number of elements.

Frameworks	jQuery 1.2.6	jQuery 1.3
Firefox 3	142		30
Firefox 3.5	45		23
Safari 3.2	92		18
Safari Nightly	75		39
Opera 9.6	39		26
IE 6		151		70
IE 7		100		50
Chrome		115		21

.hide()/.show() Results

Ran the .hide() and .show() methods on a number of elements.

Frameworks	jQuery 1.2.6	jQuery 1.3
Firefox 3	2680		722
Firefox 3.5	1867		448
Safari 3.2	1015		577
Safari Nightly	532		306
Opera 9.6	2327		1173
IE 6		8242		2715
IE 7		1912		961
Chrome		1922		551

jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation

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Happy Birthday to jQuery! jQuery is three years old today, after being released way back on January 14th, 2006 at the first BarCampNYC by John Resig.

We have four announcements for you today, we hope you’ll enjoy them!

jQuery 1.3

First, we have an excellent new release of jQuery ready for you to enjoy. The big features of this release are:

  • Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine.
  • Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist.
  • jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling.
  • HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending.
  • Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation.
  • No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.

The full details of the release can be found in the release notes:
http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3

We’re currently planning on a follow-up jQuery 1.3.1 release sometime within the next week or two to catch any straggling bugs that might’ve slipped through. If you spot any bugs please be sure to submit them to the bug tracker.

Sizzle

jQuery has a brand new CSS selector engine – nicknamed ‘Sizzle‘. You can read the full details behind it in the jQuery 1.3 Release Notes (including performance numbers).

More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers. We saw an opportunity to give something back to not just the jQuery community but to the JavaScript development community as a whole; and at the same time be able to collaborate with developers of other libraries on a single, unified, selector engine. We feel that there’s too much competition and not enough collaboration occurring and so we put our code out on the line as a good first step towards working together.

As a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve turned over Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation (an excellent non-profit well suited for this project, not to be confused with the Dojo Toolkit). We wanted a common meeting ground where all developers would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.

Our request for collaboration has already seen an amazing resopnse: Developers from Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, MochiKit, and TinyMCE (and many other projects) have all shown interest in refining Sizzle to perfection.

A rough Sizzle project page can be found here:
http://sizzlejs.com/

Along with the full source code:
http://github.com/jeresig/sizzle/tree/master

New API Browser

Along with the release of jQuery 1.3, I’m pleased to present the new API browser, developed by Remy Sharp, available at: http://api.jquery.com/.

jQuery API Browser
This is an alternative view to the existing jQuery API that should be easy to navigate and use.

The new API browser includes the following features:

  • All the latest jQuery and jQuery UI documentation.
  • The ability to mark pages as favorites for those pages you keep wanting to return to.
  • Syntax highlighting in the code examples
  • Live running of examples within the browser
  • Links to edit and experiment with the code examples

Most importantly though, the API browser is also available offline as an Adobe AIR application (thanks to Tane Piper’s AIR framework). The interface looks and works the same, and includes an auto-update mechanism, so you’ll always be up to date.

Download and install the AIR API browser

If you find problems please submit a bug to the bug tracker under the ‘site’ component.

Which leads us to the last, and certainly not the least important, point…

jQuery Foundation

With the jQuery Project growing at a tremendous rate, it was important for us, as a team, to take a step back and determine how the project’s ownership should be handled. Currently, John Resig, jQuery’s founder and lead developer, and Paul Bakaus, lead developer for jQuery UI, both maintain ownership of their respective projects. This posed several concerns from a practical and legal perspective as it enjoined two individuals as the owners of the projects instead of a formal organization. As more individuals and corporations started contributing to the projects, these concerns became even more evident causing confusion as to who were the correct copyright holders for specific units of work.

After meeting up to talk at the recent jQuery Conference, we decided to really make a concerted effort to fix this and determine how we could shift ownership of the jQuery projects to a foundation-type organization that would:

1. Understand the nature of open-source software development.
2. Allow us to continue to manage the project unhindered.
3. Ensure that the projects continue to live on regardless of who is involved in the effort.

After examining many options we came to a final conclusion – and we’re excited to announce that the Software Freedom Conservancy has extended the jQuery project an invitation to join the non-profit organization and continue developing software under its auspices. By joining The Software Freedom Conservancy, the jQuery projects and community immediately realize some important benefits:

1. It allows the current project members to continue to manage the projects and maintain ultimate responsibility for the direction of current and future efforts.
2. It allows the projects to be considered a true non-profit efforts allowing us to be able to accept donations and contributions without incurring tremendous personal financial liability.
3. The copyright of the code will be assigned to the conservancy thus ensuring that no single person will own contributions or assets of the project.
4. It may allow corporations to write off time when an employee contributes to a project.
5. Most importantly, it ensures that the jQuery projects will always be open and free software.

This is a big step in formalizing the jQuery projects and an important accomplishment in ensuring that the investment being made by the jQuery community is protected. We’ll be making the transition into the conservancy over the coming weeks. There will be very little, to no, change in how the project will run. The jQuery Team will still run and manage the project and we’re still going to work hard to build the best JavaScript library possible. If anything this will help to free up some of our time so that we can spend more time coding – and who doesn’t like the sound of that?

Happy 3rd birthday, jQuery!

Help Test jQuery 1.3 Beta 2

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We’re getting ever-closer to the final release of jQuery 1.3! In a follow-up to the recent 1.3 Beta 1 we have another test version for everyone to try. As with before, it’s not ready for production use yet but we definitely need help in hunting down any bugs that we may have missed.

Please don’t test 1.3 Beta 1 anymore – all testing should move on to beta 2. The final release of jQuery 1.3 will be on the 14th of January with a final release candidate available a few days before.

Download

A copy of jQuery 1.3b2 can be found here:

Please don’t use minified or packed versions of jQuery when testing – it makes locating bugs difficult.

Changes

So far two changes in 1.3 have been the most likely to cause problems:

  1. Old, XPath, style attribute selectors: [@attr=value]. These have been deprecated for quite some time – and we’re finally removing them. To fix it just remove the @!
  2. Bubbling triggered events. Triggered events now bubble up the DOM – some plugins haven’t expected this and have had to adapt. Its pretty easy to fix your code to “protect” against bubbling – add the following statement to your bound handler: if ( this === event.target ) { ... }

Tests

The test suite is holding up quite well. We currently have 1370 tests covering all aspects of the library and passing in all the major browsers:

jQuery 1.3b2

How to provide feedback:

  • Submit a bug to the jQuery bug tracker (you will need to create an account, first).
  • Be sure to include a simple test case for any problem that you’re experiencing (either attach the test case or provide a link).
  • Mention that you’re testing “jQuery 1.3 Beta 2” (otherwise your ticket will get confused with another release).
  • Email a link to your test case and bug report to the jQuery Dev list so that the dev team will be notified about your issue.

Thanks to everyone, in advance, for all your help in testing this release. We’re really excited about this release and can’t wait to get it into your hands.