Right on schedule jQuery 1.5 is ready for consumption!

This release has been a long time coming and has been a real team effort. Please take this opportunity to thank members of the jQuery Team and the jQuery bug triage team for their help in getting this release out the door.

Downloading

As usual, we provide two copies of jQuery, one minified and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).

• jQuery Minified (29kb Gzipped)
• jQuery Regular (207kb)

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

Additionally you can also load the URLs directly from Microsoft and Google’s CDNs:

Microsoft CDN: http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.min.js

Google CDN: https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.0/jquery.min.js

About The Release

This release saw 83 fixed bugs and a total of 460 closed tickets.

The test suite (which now has 4437 tests) passes in all the browsers that jQuery supports – and more. We verified the suite passing all of the following browsers:

• Safari 5.0.3 / 4.0.5 / 3.2.3 / 3.1.2
• Opera 11.01 / 11 / 10.63 / 10.54 / 10.10 / 9.64
• IE 6 / 7 / 8
• Firefox 4.0b9 / 3.6.13 / 3.5.11 / 3.0.19 / 2.0.0.20
• Chrome 8.0.552.215 / 8.0.552.237 / 9.0.597.67 Beta / 10.0.642.2 Dev

Additionally all of the API documentation for the release can be found on the API site: jQuery 1.5 API Documentation.

A full schedule of our upcoming releases can be found on our roadmap. Right now we’re planning on doing major jQuery releases more frequently (likely a couple times a year, rather than once per year).

So, without further ado, what’s changed in jQuery 1.5?

Ajax Rewrite

Easily the largest change in this release is the complete rewrite of the Ajax module in jQuery. This rewrite helps to fix a lot of gaps that existed in the old Ajax system along with providing a higher level of consistency across the API.

Perhaps the largest change is that a call to jQuery.ajax (or jQuery.get, jQuery.post, etc.) now returns a jqXHR object that provides consistency to the XMLHttpRequest object across platforms (and allows you to perform previously-impossible tasks like aborting JSONP requests).

More details concerning the new jqXHR object can be found in the jQuery.ajax() documentation.

In addition to a more consistent API the Ajax system is now much more extensible – allowing you to attach all sort of data handlers, filters, and transports. These changes should open up a whole realm of new Ajax plugins that can take advantage of this extensibility. More information can be found in the Extending Ajax documentation. The team is actively soliciting feedback on the Ajax extensibility API and if you have any feedback please feel free to direct it to the Developing jQuery Forum.

Deferred Objects

Along with the rewrite of the Ajax module a new feature was introduced which was also made publicly available: Deferred Objects. This API allows you to work with return values that may not be immediately present (such as the return result from an asynchronous Ajax request). Additionally it gives you the ability to attach multiple event handlers (something that wasn’t previously possible in the Ajax API).

For example, the following is now possible with jQuery’s internal Ajax API:

// Assign handlers immediately after making the request,
// and remember the jqxhr object for this request
var jqxhr = $.ajax({ url: "example.php" })
    .success(function() { alert("success"); })
    .error(function() { alert("error"); })
    .complete(function() { alert("complete"); });

// perform other work here ...

// Set another completion function for the request above
jqxhr.complete(function(){ alert("second complete"); });

Additionally you can make your own deferred objects using the exposed jQuery.Deferred. More information about this API can be found in the Deferred Object documentation.

Eric Hynds has written up a good tutorial on Using Deferreds in jQuery 1.5.

jQuery.sub()

jQuery now exposes a new way in which you can create and modify a clone of jQuery – all while still taking advantage of the full jQuery API. For example, you could use it to override native jQuery methods without actually affecting the methods that other users would interact with – or even create encapsulated APIs for your plugins that avoid namespace collision.

Here is a sample of adding a method to a jQuery sub so that it isn’t exposed externally:

  (function(){
    var sub$ = jQuery.sub();

    sub$.fn.myCustomMethod = function(){
      return 'just for me';
    };

    sub$(document).ready(function() {
      sub$('body').myCustomMethod() // 'just for me'
    });
  })();

  typeof jQuery('body').myCustomMethod // undefined

More information about jQuery.sub() can be found in the API documentation.

Note that if you’re looking to use this for plugin development, you should first strongly consider using something like the jQuery UI widget factory which manages both state and plugin sub-methods. Some examples of using the jQuery UI widget factory to build a plugin.

Adjacent Traversal Performance

In this release we’ve also been able to improve the performance of some commonly-used traversal methods: .children(), .prev(), and .next(). The speed-ups that we’re seeing are quite substantial (potentially many many times faster, depending upon the browser).

Performance Test Case and Raw Numbers

Build System

Finally, we’ve made some changes to jQuery’s internal build system. We’ve worked to standardize all of our build process upon the excellent server-side JavaScript environment: NodeJS. We especially appreciate this as we’re able to reduce our dependency upon legacy Java/Rhino systems and focus more squarely on up-and-coming JavaScript environments.

Additionally with this switch we’ve moved to using UglifyJS from the Google Closure Compiler. We’ve seen some solid file size improvements while using it so we’re quite pleased with the switch.

Thanks!

As always we want to thank everyone that helped with this release – without your contributions this release would not have been possible. If you have any questions or spot any bugs please submit your issues to the jQuery bug tracker.

When we added comments to the API documentation last January, the idea was to provide a place for members of the community to augment the documentation with their own tips or real-world examples. While this system worked well when it was first introduced, it has become increasingly difficult to manage the enormous amount of spam that it has attracted. We also found that many people were trying to use it as a support system, which it was not designed to do. Because of this, we’re planning to turn off comments on the API site later this week in favor of more directed feedback options:

• If you need help debugging your code or understanding how something works, or if you’re interested in helping others, head to the jQuery Forum or visit #jquery on irc.freenode.net.
• If you’ve found a bug or have an idea for an enhancement, please follow our bug reporting guidelines and submit your report directly to our bug tracker.
• If you notice an error or omission in our documentation and want to help us improve it, we’ll provide a simple contact form for you to fill out.

Once comments are disabled, members of the jQuery API subteam will scour old comments for any information that we can, with the commenter’s permission, roll into the documentation proper.

Observations and Lessons Learned

Even though we’ll be turning off the comment system, having it on the site the past year was a valuable experience. Here are just a few of the observations and lessons we noted along the way:

• When bug reports, feature requests, and calls for help were left in comments, instead of in the bug tracker and forums, they didn’t receive the attention they deserved.
• When well-meaning people replied to requests for help in the wrong channel, they inadvertently contributed to the fragmentation of the community.
• On the other hand, when people introduced and responded to topics in the appropriate channel, there was a much greater likelihood of successful resolution.
• Instructions for writing appropriate comments were often overlooked, regardless of their size, location, or wording.
• The value and accuracy of on-topic comments tends to wane over time as bug-fixes and enhancements are applied.
• Knowing how and when to “prune” comments was a particularly tough challenge. For example, after we revised the wording in an entry to address a comment thread, we felt that deleting the thread was appropriate. Yet, we also regretted not being able to properly thank the people who helped out without contributing to comment noise.
• If a plugin author plugs their project in the comments, is it spam? We didn’t have a good answer to this question, and many others like it, but that didn’t keep us from spending a lot of time stressing over the Right Way™ to handle these situations.

Thanks to the jQuery API Sub-team

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who have volunteered to commit their valuable time and resources to maintaining and improving the API documentation. The following people are members of the recently formed jQuery API sub-team:

• Adam Sontag
• Addy Osmani
• Alex Sexton
• Dan Heberden
• Dave Methvin
• Eddie Monge
• Jonathan Chaffer
• Karl Swedberg
• Paul Irish
• Richard Worth
• Rick Waldron
• Scott González
• Sean Koole
• Todd Parker

Additionally, thanks to all of those in the jQuery community who have contributed with their suggestions, critiques, and encouragement.

We’re nearing the final release of jQuery 1.5 – and we’re pleased to announce the release of the first release candidate! Barring any major bugs this should be the code that we end up shipping for jQuery 1.5 (which will be happening on January 31st).

The final release notes and documentation will be coming with the final 1.5 release.

jQuery 1.5 Release Candidate 1

You can get the code from the jQuery CDN:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5rc1.js

You can help us by dropping that code into your existing application and letting us know that if anything no longer works. Please file a bug and be sure to mention that you’re testing against jQuery 1.5 RC 1.

We want to encourage everyone from the community to try and get involved in contributing back to jQuery core. We’ve set up a full page of information dedicated towards becoming more involved with the team. The team is here and ready to help you help us!

Happy 5th Birthday to jQuery! jQuery was released on January 14th, 2006 today marks its 5th year of development!

To celebrate the occasion we’re releasing the first beta release of jQuery 1.5! We’re planning on having a final release candidate within 10 days and a final release by the end of the month.

We’d also like to announce three new additions to the jQuery core development team: Julian Aubourg, Colin Snover, and Anton Matzneller. All three of them have been major contributors towards the 1.5 release – providing significant code contributions, bug fixes, and triaging. Please take this opportunity to welcome them aboard!

Additionally we’d like to take take this opportunity to thank all the members of the jQuery community that have helped to get this beta release out – especially all the members of the bug triage team.

We want to encourage everyone from the community to try and get involved in contributing back to jQuery core. We’ve set up a full page of information dedicated towards becoming more involved with the team. The team is here and ready to help you help us!

So without further ado – jQuery 1.5 Beta 1!

jQuery 1.5 Beta 1

You can get the code from the jQuery CDN:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5b1.js

You can help us by dropping that code into your existing application and letting us know that if anything no longer works. Please file a bug and be sure to mention that you’re testing against jQuery 1.5 Beta 1.

jQuery 1.5 Beta 1 Change Log

This is a concise change log – full release notes will be coming with the final 1.5 release.

• Rewrite of the Ajax module by Julian Aubourg. This is the most significant change in this release and brings a number of performance, stability, and feature improvements to $.ajax. More information can be found here #7195
• Subclassing in jQuery now supported #7901
• Removed the possibility of expando collisions when using noConflict() (V8 is fast!). The expando string now uses a random number + jQuery version to differentiate between instances of jQuery instead of millisecond clock time. #6842
• Deduplicated code in $.get and $.post. #7847
• When a native browser event is bubbling up the DOM, make sure that the correct isDefaultPrevented value is reflected by jQuery’s Event object. #7793
• No longer cache non-html strings in buildFragment to avoid possible collision with the names of Object methods like toString. Testing shows this may also provide modest performance improvements. #6779
• Updated cloneCopyEvent so that it does not create superfluous data objects when cloning elements. Exposes a new method, $.hasData, for determining whether or not an object has any data. #7165
• Use a for loop rather than for/in loop when copying events so that code will work with an augmented Array.prototype. #7809, #7817
• Fixed fadeIn not working properly with inline elements. #7397
• Rewrote IE’s clone function to function properly in all known cases. #4386, #5566, #6997
• Fixed IE breaking when dispatching a ‘submit’ event on plain JS objects. #6398
• Fixed a regression in 1.4 that caused cache control to be set incorrectly for script transport. #7578
• Improve performance of get() for negative indices. #5476
• hasClass, removeClass didn’t work in IE if the attribute contained a carriage return (\r) character. #7673
• Fix a regresion in 1.4.4 where calling $.fn.data without arguments breaks on non-DOM elements. #7524
• Fixed memory leaks in IE caused by the custom abort function of $.ajax. #6242
• Prevent live events from firing on disabled elements in IE. #6911
• Fixed a regression in 1.4.3 that caused sending a Location object to $.ajax to no longer work. #7531
• Fixed an issue where some traversal methods performed an unnecessary uniqueness check. #7964
• We now support being able to specify callbacks to handle specific status codes#4964
• Fixed an issue where ?? wasn’t supported as a context-insensitive placeholder for the callback name of a JSONP request. #4897
• Data returned from dataFilter was not being passed to ajax complete() callbacks. We now use the jXHR’s promise interface to get the actual response. #4825
• We now ensure that buildFragment clones elements properly in all browsers. #6655 and #3879
• A memory leak caused when binding custom events in IE8 was fixed #7054
• Lines in form data are now delimited by CRLF when the form is submitted (as recommended by the W3C). #6876
• Ajax requests now abort on unload such that the event is only bound if the xhr transport is used. #5280
• We now support =? being detected even if it has been escaped during data serialization. #5812
• If the user uses the jsonpCallback setting we now automatically set the dataType to ‘jsonp’. #5803
• The crossDomain option now forces ajax to consider a request as cross-domain, even when its not. This is useful when servers issue redirects to cross-domain urls. #5955
• $.ajax(this) allowing retries without the recursion errors found in jQuery 1.4.3. #7461
• Removed a patch for very early versions of Opera 9 that made it impossible to animate values smaller than -10000. #7193
• ResponseText is now properly propagated for error callbacks. #7868
• Scripts onload handler passes event as first parameter so statusText is now passed as second argument for aborts. #7865
• With respect to xhr, setting contentType to false will now prevent the Content-Type header from being sent. #7465
• When serializing text, we now encode all line breaks as CRLF pairs per the application/x-www-form-urlencoded specification. #6876
• Fixed a bug with IE6 where certain event handlers were causing inter-page memory leaks. #7762
• Tests for cross-domain detection now include checking for protocol, hostname and port. #7465
• Fixed a problem where IDs containing a period would break find() without returning results. #7533
• The regression with next/adjacent selectors no longer working without the ‘prev’ element has been corrected. #7452
• Fixed the 1.4.3 regression which prevented the use of attr() on anything but DOM element nodes where the nodeType was 1 #7452, #7500,
• A bug where including jQuery 1.3.2 resulted in a border on the right-hand side of the screen in IE8 has been fixed. #5575
• We’ve fixed an issue where adding extra methods to Array.prototype and using jQuery.clone(true) to clone an element resulted in invalid event bindings. #6355
• Fixed an issue where the nth-child does not handle whitespace correctly in Internet Explorer. #7558
• We corrected a bug where mouseenter/leave behaved like mouseover/out when using live events #5821
• Fixed a regression in 1.4.3 where the eq() selector was no longer working with previous and adjacent selectors #7906
• Updated the documentation on event.currentTarget to address any confusion regarding jQuery.proxy. #7628
• Fixed an issue where xhr.setRequestHeader(‘Accept’,…) appended the value rather than replacing it. #6230
• An IE issue where ajax methods failed for content types ending in ‘+xml’ (eg. rss+xml) was fixed. #4958
• The updates to ajax now allow any request to be aborted. #3442
• A .slideUp() issue in FireFox 3.6.11 was fixed which previously hid the frameset border and legend but left any content uncovered by another element. #7308
• We now support cross-browser XML parsing. #6693
• Fixed a bug where when using dataType:’json’ in the .ajax() method, the data object was undefined in IE6 and 7. #6106
• Corrected an issue where JSONP calls were not removing the script tag when the call completed. #7418
• Updated the documentation to reflect the behaviour supported when using delay() with show() if the duration is not specified. #7543

Allow me to introduce the bug triage team with a chart:

Over the past 60 days, the bug triage team has taken an unwieldy hairy mess of tickets and addressed every single one of them.

Yes that’s right; as it stands, there are zero unreviewed tickets in the jQuery issue tracker. The last one to be closed was a rather malodorous bug.

The jQuery Bug Triage team are a group of jQuery core and community members who actively assist in narrowing down and patching bugs submitted on the jQuery bug tracker. Between them this team have a number of years worth of experience in debugging and fixing both JavaScript and jQuery issues. When you submit a bug, feature request or enhancement request to the project, they’re the team that looks at your tickets.

The team members are:

• Dave Methvin is co-founder of PC Pitstop, jQuery user since 2005, and on the jQuery core team.
• Addy Osmani is a London-based User-interface developer at Aol as well as a regular jQuery blogger.
• Colin Snover is an independent software designer and developer based out of Minneapolis.
• Rick Waldron is Head of Research and Development at Bocoup in Boston, MA
• Alex Sexton is a Labs Engineer at Bazaarvoice in Austin TX, and a co-host of the yayQuery podcast.
• Adam J Sontag is a NYC-based developer for Bocoup, and a co-host of the yayQuery podcast.
• Mike Taylor works for Opera Software and sometimes gets hit by cars on his bike.
• Dan Heberden is a web consultant based in Portland, Oregon and is on the jQuery UI team
• Anton Matzneller is a computer science student and developer located in Vienna, Austria.

We all owe these guys a good amount of thanks. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work to benefit jQuery.

<== jQuery heroes

Now, some other news from the development front…

New (and undocumented) Features

jQuery.readyWait
Introduced in jQuery 1.4.3 was a counter called readyWait. This provides a way for control flow to get to a point where registered ready() handlers are invoked.

Event Map Support Extended
.live(), .die(), .delegate() and .undelegate() now support maps of events as a parameter in the same manner that bind and unbind currently do.

Overrides available for .getData(), .setData() and .changeData()
As mentioned in the jQuery 1.4.3 release notes we previously provided two events, setData and getData (broadcast whenever data is set or retrieved through the .data() method). In the latest versions of jQuery you are actually able to override these events in order to provide alternative behavior for those features. For example, you can return a different value or prevent a particular value being set.

Regressions

We determined that a regression was introduced in 1.4.3 which limited the use of attr() to nodeType 1 DOM element nodes. Although this was fixed in 1.4.4, attr(name) and attr(name, value) still fail in specific circumstances. We are targeting a fix for this to land in jQuery 1.4.5.

jQuery UI Bug Tracker Updated

The jQuery UI Bug tracker recently received the same enhancements as jQuery Core from Mr. Colin Snover and you can now find the same great voting and tracking options for submitting bugs, features and enhancement requests as you can on the jQuery Core tracker. This will make it significantly more easy for you to find out when we’ve taken a look at your ticket so you can follow-up in case there are any additional questions or updates regarding fixes.

Tips For jQuery Bug Patching

jQuery has quite an active development community and from time to time our community members wish to patch bugs or issues they’ve discovered for submission to the project for review.

If this sounds like something you would like to get involved in, we’ve put together a commented build file (courtesy of Rick Waldron) that will help you get setup for patching bugs using a LAMP or MAMP stack. You can download this build file via a gist. If you have questions on how to get setup, please feel free to leave a comment on the gist above or ask us about it in the #jquery IRC channel.

(Thx to Addy Osmani, who drafted much of this post for me :)