jQuery Conference 2008 Agenda

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The sold-out jQuery Conference 2008, being held in Boston at the MIT Stata Center on September 28th, is nearly upon us. With 13 sessions being delivered by the jQuery team as well as prominent industry experts such as Jonathan Snook, Aza Raskin and Cody Lindley, this is sure to be a stellar event.

The conference has been broken out into two tracks, Beginner and Advanced, to allow developers of various jQuery expertise to take full advantage of the sessions that will be suit their needs. Below you will find the agenda for the conference. In the interest of sharing information, we wanted to put up the agenda as soon as possible. We will be releasing another page shortly that will provide topic descriptions as well as bios for each of the speakers.

Featured Presenters:

John Resig

John Resig

John Resig is the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. He’s also a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques.

Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. He’s hard at work on his second book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, due in bookstores Late 2008.

Joern Zaefferer

Joern Zaefferer

Jörn Zaefferer is a member of the core jQuery team. Along his work on jQuery itself, he wrote and maintains several of the most popular jQuery plugins. Jörn Zaefferer works as a consultant for maxence integration technologies GmbH in Cologne, Germany, where he architects and develops Java-based web applications for maxence’s customers and maxence’s own products.

Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook

Web designer and developer, Jonathan Snook moves effortlessly from client-side, front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, and his fluency in CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL make make him the “turn-to” man for many high-profile clients. Coauthor of Accelerated DOM Scripting and The Art and Science of CSS, he writes regularly at his popular blog snook.ca, and for Digital Web and Sitepoint. Jonathan also works with his partners at Sidebar Creative, makers of world-class websites and innovative applications.

Richard Worth

Richard Worth

Richard D. Worth is a Web developer in the Washington, DC area. He works for Fulcrum IT on web services contracts, primarily for the government. Richard is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard is also a contributing author on dmxzone.com, writing regular beginner and advanced jQuery UI articles, and has been selected as a Technical Reviewer for a book on jQuery UI to be published in the fall.

Paul Bakaus

Paul Bakaus

Paul Bakaus is a UI architect living in Germany. He’s the creator and lead of jQuery UI and works for the open source company Liferay in a full-time sponsored position to jQuery UI. He’s responsible for the overall direction and roadmap of jQuery UI and he enjoys speaking about his user interface work in many places of the world. He’s also a member of the jQuery core team and takes part in the discussion of the overall direction of the jQuery project. In the past, he was largely responsible for creating the jQuery dimensions plugin (which is now part of the jQuery core) and worked together with Stefan Petre on the rich effects and components library Interface.

Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz

In addition to being the co-author of jQuery In Action, Yehuda Katz is a contributor to Ruby in Practice and co-author of the upcoming Merb in Action. He is a core contributor to DataMapper and jQuery. Before coming to Engine Yard, he worked for on a construction management tool written in Ruby on Rails and jQuery. Yehuda is a Merb core developer, contributes to Rubinius, and is taking a lead role in the development of Engine Yard’s new Control Panel.

Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin

Aza Raskin is the founder of Humanized (now part of Mozilla), Songza, and Bloxes. The son of Apple software pioneer Jef Raskin, he brings a keen interest in human interface design to everything he does.

Karl Swedberg

Karl Swedberg

After having taught high school English, edited copy for an advertising agency, and owned a coffee house, Karl Swedberg began his career as a web developer three years ago. He now works for Fusionary Media in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he specializes in client-side scripting and interaction design. Karl is an “Evangelist” for the jQuery JavaScript Library and the co-author of two books, Learning jQuery and jQuery Reference Guide.

Scott Jehl

Scott Jehl

Scott Jehl is a designer at Filament Group, a Boston, MA studio specializing in web application design and development. At Filament, Scott and his colleagues frequently contribute design and code to the jQuery community, and recently built ThemeRoller, a theme design application for jQuery UI. Scott leads the design team at jQuery, and runs WriteMaps, an ajax web application for building visual website sitemaps. He enjoys wake/skate/snowboarding, being outdoors, and spending time with his wife Stephanie and their two cats.

Jonathan Sharp

Jonathan Sharp

Jonathan Sharp is a standards driven freelance web designer and developer. With experience in both frontend and backend technolgoies he brings value in integration delivering a seamless user experience. Jonathan has also developed a number of jQuery plugins such as jdMenu, jdNewsScroll and positionBy. Prior to freelancing, Jonathan worked for Union Pacific Railroad, CSC and Motorola, Inc. in Chicago after helping found Imprev, Inc. in Bellevue, WA in early 2000. He lives in Nebraska with his wife, Erin, and their daughter Noel. When not working he enjoys spending time with his family, playing with their dogs, and riding off into the sunset on Micah, his draft horse.

Kevin Hoyt

Kevin Hoyt

Kevin Hoyt is a Platform Evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences, you’ll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, presenting online seminars, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm with other developers. When not on the road, Kevin enjoys spending time with his family, photography and general aviation.

Cody Lindley

Cody Lindley

Cody Lindley is a Christian, husband, son, brother, professional web developer, and outdoor enthusiast. He spends the majority of his time sleeping and working, but who doesn’t? In between the daily routines of the average American, he desires an existence that entails a relationship with God, family, and nature. He considers himself a bookworm and a novice theologian, but truth be told, he simply enjoys watching movies and playing Xbox way too much. He is thankful for the luxury of pursuing his profession as a personal passion. More details can be found about cody on his site codylindley.com.

Mike Alsup

Mike Alsup

Mike Alsup is a Senior Developer at Click Commerce in Rochester, NY. He has been developing software solutions for 15 years with a current focus on Java, Swing, J2EE and web applictions. Involved with the jQuery project since near its inception in early 2006, Mike has authored many popular plugins including the Form Plugin, BlockUI, Taconite and Cycle.

Agenda:

Beginner Advanced
9:00 – 9:30
Registration, Breakfast
9:30 – 9:55
State of jQuery – John Resig
10:00 – 10:50 Learning jQuery – Karl Swedberg Optimizing jQuery Core – John Resig
11:00 – 11:50 jQuery Case Studies – Cody Lindley
and Jonathan Snook
Writing Scalable jQuery Applications – Yehuda Katz
12:00 – 1:00
Lunch
1:00 – 1:50 Rich Interactivity, Simplified with jQuery UI – Richard Worth An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI – Paul Bakaus
2:00 – 2:50 Designing Reusable jQuery Components – Scott Jehl Desktop Applications with jQuery and Adobe AIR – Kevin Hoyt
3:00 – 3:50 Making the Case for jQuery – Jonathan Sharp Using jQuery in Firefox Extensions – Aza Raskin
4:00 – 4:50 Your First jQuery Plugin – Mike Alsup Building Robust jQuery Plugins – Joern Zaefferer
5:00 – 6:00
Dinner
Later
Cambridge Brewing Company for drinks and socializing

Full details of the individual sessions, biographies of the speakers, and additional conference information is forthcoming.

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

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We’ve been listening to your feedback today, about the new jQuery site redesign and one thing has become clear:

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Poor dude didn’t even last 24 hours. We wanted to have some fun with the home page, but this bordered on a little too “extreme” for most tastes.

We plan on bringing some further revisions to the homepage in the future, but in the meantime here’s a quick overhaul, put together by the always-excellent Scott Jehl, that’ll help tide everyone over:

jQuery Homepage

As a token of our appreciation for sticking with the “JavaScript Rock Star” for a day we’ve included a little Easter Egg in the new site. It would be useful if you knew the Konami Code.

Naturally, the whole redesign still has many tweaks that’ll be made over the next couple weeks, especially to individual page fonts, font sizes, and colors.

I want to, once again, thank Scott Jehl for all the hard work that he’s been putting in to the site design – and the excellent Varick Rosete (of nGenWorks and Happy Webbies) for the great illustration that he drew for us.

Here’s to many happy days of rockin’ out with jQuery!

jQuery.com Site Redesign

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We’ve just pushed out a brand new site redesign (for jQuery.com and all its sub-sites). This has been a long time coming and it feels great to get it out the door.

New Homepage

jQuery.com

Easily the most contentious part of the redesign – but absolutely the most eye-catching.

jQuery has long been driven by rock, even looking back to its original release which was heavily inspired by the always-excellent Devo. We shot for a catchy design that helped to bring JavaScript out of the cold doldrums that it frequently inhabits – giving it a serious jolt of fun.

New Site Layout

jQuery Docs

The entirety of the site has a new layout. With drastically improved multi-layer navigation and a standardized sidebar it should become much easier to navigate the individual portions of the site.

You should probably wear a hard hat while exploring the interior pages – font sizes, spacing, and colors are all in need of tweaking, which will be handled over the upcoming week (it’s fun working against Trac, WordPress, Drupal, and Mediawiki simultaneously).

New Logo

jQuery Logo

The original jQuery logo was a variation of the Devo hat – we’ve taken that concept, turned it on its ear, and made it something that we can call our own – while still being inspired by the original contours of the Devo Energy Dome.

Thanks

Site and Logo Design: Scott Jehl – he put a fantastic amount of work into this redesign, bringing it all the way from conception to final implementation.

Rockin’ Illustration: Varick Rosete from nGenWorks also of Happy Webbies fame.

Initial Logo Prototyping: Bradley Sepos.

Also want to thank Media Temple for our hosting. They’ve been helping us a lot this past week migrating our sites to some new servers – expect some speed improvements for the sub-domains very soon.

jQuery UI 1.5.2

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About 4 days ago, many have noticed that we had uploaded another minor bugfix release to our Google Code account. While there’s, again, no new API introduced, more than 30 issues have been cleared and the codebase is growing more stable every day.

The full changelog is available here if you want to find out if a specific issue has been addressed. As with 1.5.1, updating to this version is highly recommended and likely not to break anything in your written code.

You can grab the latest release as always via the downloader or as developer package at http://ui.jquery.com/download or if you prefer, get it as latest tag from Subversion.

As a last comment, this is probably the last minor release before 1.6, which we will announce before the end of July, so watch out for a couple of awesome new components and enhancements soon!

Have a nice day,

Paul Bakaus & the jQuery UI Team

jQuery UI 1.5.1

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Soon after the release of jQuery UI 1.5, we were getting many useful feedback and issues entered in our bugtracker. Today, we’re happy to release another version of jQuery UI which takes care of many minor regressions and a lot of unsolved issues.

1.5.1 doesn’t add any new features or API changes, but fixes more than 50 found issues. A full changelog is available, if you want to know the specifics. Updating to this version is highly recommended and likely not to break anything in your written code.

Additionally, issues within ThemeRoller and the demos on our homepage also have been reported and fixed. We are now continuing to finish all unit tests and functional demos, so expect to see another release of both UI and its website soon again.

You can grab the latest release as always via the downloader or as developer package at http://ui.jquery.com/download or if you prefer, get it as latest tag from Subversion.

See you soon,

Paul Bakaus & the jQuery UI Team

jQuery 1.2.6: Events 100% faster

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jQuery 1.2.6 is primarily a bug fix release for jQuery 1.2. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

This is the next release immediately following jQuery 1.2.3. Releases 1.2.4 and 1.2.5 were skipped (1.2.4 was built incorrectly, rendering it effectively identical to 1.2.3, and 1.2.5 was missing a patch).

The entire jQuery team did a fantastic job in pulling this release together – I want to take this opportunity to thank them all for their continued hard work.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to welcome Ariel Flesler to the core jQuery development team. He provided valuable help in pulling this release together – contributing bug fixes, performance improvements, features, and test cases. You can see the result of his hard work all throughout this release. Welcome Ariel and thank him for all his contributions!

Downloading

jQuery 1.2.6:

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

svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.2.6

Performance Improvements

Once again the jQuery team has worked hard to bring huge performance improvements in this release. As with previous releases we’ve expanded to look at many areas of the jQuery framework, looking for common pain points, and providing relief.

All data and test cases for the below performance improvements can be found in the the following jQuery 1.2.3 v. 1.2.6 Google Spreadsheet (results for Internet Explorer 6 were excluded in favor of Internet Explorer 7 due to their virtually-identical results).

Event Handling is 103% Faster

In analyzing intense application code (specifically operations such as drag-and-drop) we looked for ways in which universal changes could be made that would affect all users. A frequently-called piece of code was that of the jQuery event handler, any optimizations to it would dramatically improve the performance of all resulting frequently-called events. By focusing improvements here all frequently-called events that you have should see immediate benefits.

CSS Selectors are 13% faster

A number of optimizations have been made to internal jQuery methods, dramatically improving their performance, while providing measurable benefit to some of the most commonly used code in jQuery (such as the CSS Selector code).

For example the jQuery.map() method is now 866% faster and jQuery.extend() is 19% faster. These two changes have allowed for dramatic improvements in performance all throughout the library.

.offset() is 21% faster

Together with the improvements to jQuery’s event handling code optimizations of .offset() have allowed intense mouse-based operations to become much faster. For example jQuery UI’s drag-and-drop code is now over 300% faster because of these change (allowing you to achieve faster, smoother, drag-and-drop operations).

.css() is 25% faster

A method that’s frequently called (both internally and externally). The optimizations to this method are easily felt in others (like .offset(), for example).

New Features and Major Changes

Dimensions Plugin is Now Part of Core

The remaining methods of the Dimensions plugin, by Brandon Aaron, have been introduced into jQuery core, along with additional bug fixes and performance improvements. This plugin has seen considerable use amongst developers and plugin authors and has become a solid part of the jQuery ecosystem. We’ve been, slowly, introducing the most-used methods from the Dimensions plugin over the past couple releases – but with the release of 1.2.6 all remaining methods are now part of core.

If you’re upgrading your copy of jQuery to version 1.2.6 you can now opt to exclude the Dimensions plugin from your code.

The full documentation for Dimensions can be found on the jQuery documentation site (and is in the process of becoming integrated with the core jQuery documentation).

.attr() overhaul

The .attr() method has been completely overhauled (resolving about 15 outstanding bugs). Additionally, the method has been significantly simplified and optimized.

.toggle() can now accept more functions

Historically jQuery’s .toggle() function has accepted two functions (to be toggled in an even/odd manner). However that has been changed so that any number of functions can be provided and toggled by a mouse click.

$("div").toggle(function(){
  $(this).removeClass("three").addClass("one");
}, function(){
  $(this).removeClass("one").addClass("two");
}, function(){
  $(this).removeClass("two").addClass("three");
});

You can now unbind bound .toggle() and .one() functions

function test(){ $(this).addClass("test"); }
$("div").one("click", test);
$("div").unbind("click", test);

$("div").toggle(test, test);
$("div").unbind("click", test);

.index() supports jQuery collections

jQuery’s .index() function has allowed you to find the location of a DOM element in the jQuery collection – now you can also specify a jQuery collection (the first element of which will be extracted and located in the original set).

var test = $("div.test");
$("div").index( test ) == 3

jQuery.makeArray can convert ANYTHING to an array.

jQuery’s internal .makeArray() method now converts any array-like object into a new array. Additionally it wraps all other objects as an array and returns the resulting set.

jQuery.makeArray( document.getElementsByTagName("div") )
// => [ div, div, div ]

jQuery.makeArray( true )
// => [ true ]

jQuery.makeArray()
// => []

beforeSend can cancel Ajax calls

The beforeSend Ajax callback has allowed developers to execute a piece of code prior to a request occurring – now that code can also verify the integrity of some parameters and cancel the resulting Ajax request (useful for tasks like form validation).

$.ajax({
  beforeSend: function(){
    return $("#input").val() == "";
  },
  url: "test.php"
});

Exposed Speeds

jQuery has a number of named animation speeds (such as ‘slow’, ‘fast’, and ‘default’) you can now provide your own names for animation speeds, or modify the existing ones, by manipulating the jQuery.fx.speeds object.

jQuery.fx.speeds.slow = 1000;
$("#test").slideDown("slow");

jQuery UI 1.5 release candidate, we’re getting excited

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The jQuery 1.5 release candidate is now available at http://ui.jquery.com/download for everyone to test and download!

This is the most stable UI version ever, and it fixed all known bugs that are not in the categories “minor” or “trivial”, which means that we ourselves think it’s good to go. However, the reason why we’re still holding off with the final release is the fact that we want you to try out every aspect of our release candidate.

Therefore, the jQuery UI team encourages you to try out the demos on the website in any of the supported browsers, play around with every option you can find and test in different browsers using the new unit tests, which we’re finalizing right now. If you grab the whole development package from the website, it will come with unit tests for slider, draggables and resizables. We are working on other automated tests, which can be downloaded in the next few days from our SVN.

If you find anything strange going on, or if something isn’t working / looking like it should, that’s great :-) ! Please then submit your issue to us via the new jQuery UI bugtracker at http://ui.jquery.com/bugs/newticket. This will greatly help us to make the final release as solid as possible.

Now we really don’t want you to wait any longer than needed: I’m very excited to announce that jQuery UI 1.5 will be released and announced in exactly 6 days, on June 8th, along with updated documentation and a epic changelog to convince your bosses and collegues.

See you soon!

The jQuery UI Team

jQuery UI 1.5b4, featuring effects and a new home

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jQuery UI 1.5b4

Attention: We originally intended to release 1.5b3 a couple of hours ago, but we had two serious issues that forced use to deprecate it and go for b4. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The third and last beta has finally arrived to jQuery UI 1.5. Hundreds of hours went into fixing more than 50 bugs for this release – it’s all about stability. jQuery UI 1.5b4 is the last release before pushing out a release candidate – and with only 5 major bugs left, you can expect to see the next release in the next couple of days!

Although it’s mainly a stability release, we also introduced many new API helpers, removed the dimensions dependancy and made all plugins a bit smaller by introducing a generic widget factory into the core. Even better, performance of UI components firing events (i.e. “mousemove” in Draggables) was dramatically improved with recent changes in the jQuery core.

With the release candidate following right after this one, we will also push out a live test suite for everyone to use on any platform, helping us to track down issues, and fixing them for the final release. Yes, this means you an expect a stable, solid and performance-optimised 1.5 release this month!

Go grab the whole package (This package includes a custom build jQuery you’ll need, too):

jquery.ui-1.5b4.zip

jQuery Enchant becomes part of jQuery UI

After many weeks of discussions, I’m particulary happy to announce that the unreleased jQuery effects suite “Enchant”, earlier introduced as sister library to jQuery UI, is now a part of jQuery UI. With the 1.5b4 release, you’ll see a bunch of new files in the project’s folder!

The jQuery UI effects can be used standalone or together with UI and have a separate core, which extend the jQuery core to introduce easing, class transitions (morphing) and color animations. All further effects are tighly integrated into the main API and can be used as standalone ( $(..).effect() ) or directly from within jQuery methods you already know ( hide()/show() ).

There’s no documentation for the rich effect API at this point, but we’ll make sure it’s released before the final release of jQuery UI 1.5. In the meantime, feel free to start digging through the code – and watch more more blog posts discussing the new effects!

Overall, we have more than 15 ready-to-use effects for you to use in your projects, not only including everything you know from script.aculo.us (blind,bounce,drop,fold,slide …), but also fresh new effects (transfer, explode. clip, scale) for you to enjoy!

jQuery UI has a new home

UI Website

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that jQuery UI has finally found a new home at http://ui.jquery.com, along with brand new content, a new combined logo and a complete new design. After many weeks of iterations, we finally found the time to concentrate a bit on the website.

The new site features a complete new download builder already including effects, a real-world demo carousel, and a functional demo suite that makes it easy to see and try out UI examples and their syntax. Also planned for the next weeks is a theme section with directions on downloading UI themes and how to make them, and a tutorials section that will feature easy tutorials to easily learn controlling UI widgets.

A big thanks and kudos goes to Liferay’s Art Director Brian Miller, who did a great job and invested countless hours to achieve this beautiful design!

See you soon!

Paul Bakaus and the jQuery UI Team

jQuery Worldwide Sprint a huge success

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The jQuery Worldwide Sprint (see previous post) is over, and it was a wonderful momentum and great experience for many of us.

We made great use of the sprint wiki page during the sprint, and it now serves as a reference of what we accomplished, including meeting summaries and irc logs.

We moved a lot closer to jQuery UI 1.5, and we had 20+ people actively participating, working in one of four different groups:

Development Group

The dev group was solely focusing on the codebase of jQuery UI. They fixed more than 20 issues in our bugtracker, and implemented missing features such as the greedy option in Droppables. Additionally, we improved the core of UI in a very positive way: we got rid of two dependancies (jquery.dimensions.js and ui.mouse.js) and added one (ui.base.js). The impact was so great that even the core was changed: jQuery itself now includes useful methods from the Dimensions plugin (more on this in the upcoming blog post).

Test Group

The test group focused on writing and running a full suite of unit tests for each UI Plugin. This is critical, to ensure that all the features of each plugin are thoroughly tested in all supported browsers. The unit test coverage after the sprint is about 60%. Our goal is to have it in the high 90s before 1.5 final.

Demos Group

The demos group created a brilliant functional demo template and functional demos for many of our plugins. Also, many volunteers worked on stunning real-world examples that show how a specific plugin can be used in a real world scenario. All demos will flow into the new demo category on our upcoming website.

Documentation Group

The docs group had the pleasure of pouring over the documentation for each UI plugin, comparing to the source code, to unit tests, and demo pages. They wrote and updated to ensure correctness and clarity, for even an absolute newcomer to jQuery UI.

Thank you

So after all, we haven’t completely reached all of our goals, and we still have to work hard on fixing all issues still open. But we made huge progress that certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the combined power of all who helped. Not only this, but the Sprint was also a great way to introduce and motivate new people to join the UI project.

A big thanks to everyone who helped during the sprint and before the sprint – especially Richard Worth, who had the initial idea and made this event possible (he did all the hard stuff ;-) ), Eduardo Lundgren, who managed the demo group and worked insanely long hours during the sprint, and all the others who made huge contributions on both days.

But it’s not over until it’s over: We stll have to date 46 issues opened in our bugtracker until we are ready to roll out the final version of UI 1.5. Therefore, we are already thinking about a follow-up sprint. More on that soon here!

See you soon!

Paul Bakaus & the jQuery Team

jQuery UI Worldwide Sprint: March 14-15

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The jQuery UI Team is pleased to announce its first Worldwide Sprint, to take place next Friday and Saturday, March 14-15, 2008. Two full days of testing, fixes, documentation, and general getting-stuff-done. Our goal is to get the jQuery UI 1.5 release (alpha, beta) ready for final, and we invite any and all to help. Whether you have an hour, or an afternoon, come and run really fast with us.

How Will It Work?

We’ll all gather in IRC (#jquery-sprint on freenode) throughout the two-day sprint, with a couple of scheduled meetings to keep everyone on the same page, and make sure things keep moving. Other than that we’ll just be doing as much as we can, as fast as we can. Opening tickets, closing tickets, breaking stuff, fixing other things, and everyone’s favorite pastime: documentation.

I’m New Here. Can I Help?

Absolutely. If you’ve thought about contributing to jQuery or jQuery UI before, but never really found the right moment or momentum, this sprint is the perfect time to get involved. Paul and I will be around, as well other members of the jQuery Team to help people get started, especially if it’s your first time. We’ll help you help us, in whatever way you want. That could be testing, documentation, ticket triage, bug fixes, writing demos, or even just playing with new stuff as we churn it out, and providing valuable feedback. We want to ensure this release is rock solid on all supported browsers, including yours.

More Details

We’ve created a wiki page to help coordinate this big event. It has some more details on what is planned, how to jump in, and will be updated throughout the sprint to show status and next steps. We invite you to add your name to the page as a participant, if you’re interested, even if you have only a few hours (or aren’t sure how much time you’ll have). Also, feel free to specify what you’re willling and/or able to do. Thanks!