jQuery 1.8.2 Released

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We’re pleased to announce that jQuery 1.8.2 is available! This version fixes several bugs and performance regressions reported from the past couple of releases, and we think the 1.8 line is pretty solid at this point. The only way to know for sure that it works with your code is to test it–so please do!

As always, we have put out the jQuery-shaped signal lights; the master control centers at the Google and Microsoft CDNs are on high alert and will soon post these files. For immediate relief, please use the copies above. If you find a problem, please post a bug report and be sure to include a test case from jsfiddle.net or jsbin.com.

The complete change log for jQuery 1.8.2 is below. If this is your first upgrade to the 1.8 line, be sure to read the blog entries for 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 to see what’s changed.

Many thanks to the patch contributors for this version; ye shall know them by their GitHub handles: timmywil, gibson042, rwldrn, joyvuu-dave, jaubourg, staabm, and sindresorhus. In addition, we thank all the community members who took the time to contribute quality bug reports with test cases. Your initial groundwork makes it possible for us to find and fix bugs.

jQuery 1.8.2 Change Log

Deferred

  • #12521: Deferred.promise( target) only works fine when typeof( target)=='object'

Event

  • #12423: jQuery breaks with Comcast Protection Guard and any anti-keylogging protection software on IE7+
  • #12436: Performance degradation with delegate events and pseudo-classes

Misc

  • #12229: Some inconsistencies/optimizations

Offset

  • #12534: .offset() throws an error on BlackBerry5 and iOS3
  • #12536: Make .offset() calc less wrong on browsers w/o getBoundingClientRect

Selector

  • #12303: Attribute selector fails if the attribute value contains :first :last
  • #12337: :nth-child selector not accurate after new child element added
  • #12361: seleter has bug
  • #12448: :contains() edge case throwing an error
  • #12492: In textarea focus event handler, $(this).is(':focus') == false in Chrome & Safari
  • #12523: JQuery renders line breaks as text nodes
  • #12526: :last selector fails to find a match
  • #12541: 1.8.0 and 1.8.1: Double :not() selector fails in IE6/7
  • #12572: :contains breaks searching iframes v1.8

Traversing

  • #12474: Using find on a collection with append does not return the correct elements

jQuery UK 2013

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jQuery UK is back for 2013!

The jQuery Foundation is pleased to announce that White October are organising another jQuery UK  conference in Oxford, UK on the 19th of April 2013.

There is a call for papers and suggestions for speakers are also welcome. So if you want to take part, or want to see someone at jQuery UK you know what to do.

A very small number of tickets are on sale until the call for papers finishes on the 11th of October for a “blind bird” price of £130 + VAT.

The full speaker lineup should be announced winter 2012 and the early bird tickets will go on sale at the same time for £160 + VAT.

We’ve also listed it on Lanyrd.com if you’d like to follow along there!

jQuery Licensing Changes

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Some important changes have occurred in the latest releases of several jQuery projects such as core, UI, Mobile, Sizzle, and QUnit. You may not have noticed them because they didn’t really change the actual code, documentation, or functionality. Instead, these changes were designed to clarify the ownership and licensing of the software. If you’re not a lawyer, most of this won’t make a lot of difference to you, but it’s important to us.

One simplification we made was to remove the GNU General Public License (GPL), leaving only the MIT License. Having just one license option makes things easier for the Foundation to manage and eliminates confusion that existed about the Foundation’s previous dual-licensing policy. However, this doesn’t affect your ability to use any of the Foundation’s projects. You are still free to take a jQuery Foundation project, make changes, and re-license it under the GPL if your situation makes that desirable. The Free Software Foundation site confirms that the MIT License is a “lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.”

Over time, more than 500 people have contributed to the projects currently managed by the jQuery Foundation. We’re working hard to make sure that everyone who has contributed gets the credit they deserve. Many of the projects now have an AUTHORS.txt file in their root that list all the major contributors in chronological order. Scott González did a lot of the heavy lifting to get the author lists in order, and created useful tools so that we can keep them that way. Of course, you can always see the author of a specific change to a project by looking at the commit in the git log or on GitHub.

It’s important to the jQuery Foundation that licensing of the code and documentation is clear, so the community can continue to use it without interruption. Doing so requires a “paper trail” so it is unambiguous that the Foundation has permission to use the code and the contributor had the ability to contribute that code in the first place. For an example of the latter, think about the situation where an employee works on jQuery Foundation projects at the company office; their employer might claim they own that work and the employee had no right to license it to the Foundation.

To make the licensing clear, contributors are asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). jQuery team members will sign a Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA) which actually assigns the copyright to the jQuery Foundation. For more discussion of what a CLA or CAA does, see this article.

All of these changes guarantee that the jQuery Foundation’s open source projects will be dependable resources for developers and businesses. They also ensure that when you contribute, you’ll get some recognition for the work that you’ve done. So with all that legal stuff out of the way, come help us build the jQuery Foundation projects!

Help Us Money-ify UglifyJS 2.0

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In nature, an ecosystem consists of the organisms, raw materials, and all of the complex interactions that shape their shared environment. The open source ecosystem is no different. Each project has its niche, and any package that is a dependency of course has dependencies of its own. jQuery is used on millions of websites, but we wouldn’t be there without the excellent tools on which we rely to build, test, and distribute our code.

One such tool is Mihai Bazon’s excellent UglifyJS. We’ve been using Uglify to compress jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile for nearly two years now, so if you’ve used any of our minified builds recently, you’ve benefited from Mihai’s work. Recently, he began work on UglifyJS 2.0, which will feature even better compression, support for source maps, and a command line utility. He also announced a Pledgie campaign to support his efforts.

Here at the Foundation, our goal is not just to improve libraries that start with “jQuery,” but rather the entire JavaScript ecosystem in which we all participate. That’s why we’re happy today to announce some exciting news – and to issue a challenge!

Help build UglifyJS 2.0!
Click here to lend your support to: Funding development of UglifyJS 2.0 and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

We’ve just kicked in 500€ to the campaign to recognize his work so far, but there’s more we all can do. If the community can help us to help Mihai reach his goal of 3,000€  by the end of September, we’ll donate an additional 500€ to the UglifyJS 2.0 project!

We’re looking forward to keeping you posted on the progress here, and participating in similar endeavors in the future to help improve the tools we use each day. In the meantime, thanks for considering a donation (even a small one), and if we haven’t convinced you yet, perhaps this final exhortation will: THINK OF THE BYTES!

Update (5:30): Awesome! The Dojo Foundation has matched our donation!