For many years now the jQuery team first, and then the jQuery Foundation as an organization, has helped developers all over the world to write simple, concise, and clean code that isn’t affected by all the browser incompatibilities that developers are well-accustomed to. As you know, all the jQuery Foundation projects are maintained by a group of volunteers who keep the libraries relevant and in line with modern browser APIs and issues. The team also keeps the API documentation and educational guides up to date.

In the next few months, the team will work on the several jQuery-related websites to ensure an even higher standard of quality to help millions of users write their code. There is so much to do and our resources are limited, so today we are asking you for help. Part of the team is currently focusing their attention on the Learning Center, but we appreciate help in any repository. If ever the jQuery Foundation projects have saved you work and frustration, this is the right time to give something back. There are many ways in which you can contribute, and you don’t have to be an expert developer. You can help the project by fixing issues in the code or improving the documentation. Everything counts. The jQuery Foundation welcomes contributions from anyone willing to put in the time and effort to help us and our community of users.

To learn more about how you can contribute, visit the Contribute website, sign our Contributor License Agreement and start helping. In case you can’t help us by addressing code or documentation problems but you still love our projects, you can help us by making a small donation.

The jQuery Foundation exists to support web developers in creating web content built on open standards that is accessible to all users. We accomplish this through the development and support of open source software, and collaboration with the development community. The Foundation houses open source projects that are essential to this vision.

What we’ve accomplished

We’ve always been known for our namesake projects and their excellent documentation. In the past year, the jQuery Foundation has continued its quest to ensure that web developers have the tools and information they need to get their jobs done, beyond just jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile.

The past few months in particular have been incredibly productive. In October, we adopted the jQuery Mousewheel plugin. In December, Google transferred ownership of the Pointer Events Polyfill (PEP) to the jQuery Foundation. Finally, in January, we announced adoption of the Esprima project, a JavaScript parser that is used by dozens of developer tools. We’re working to foster the continued development of all of these projects, and welcome contributions from the community.

In 2014 we started work on the Chassis project to create an open standard for CSS libraries. We’ve had discussions with developers from Topcoat, Zurb Foundation, Filament Group, Cardinal, Famo.us, Yandex, WordPress, Automattic, 10up, 960grid, Unsemantic, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, Intel App Framework, Cascade CSS, Portland Webworks, Adobe, Hulu, and Bootstrap. We’re looking for additional contributors and input from the community about what you want in a CSS framework.

Our year by the numbers

Today, the jQuery Foundation hosts 45 open source repositories at GitHub. These include both code and documentation.

If you need evidence that jQuery Foundation projects are used everywhere, look no further than our Content Delivery Network (CDN) powered by MaxCDN. The 290 billion requests in 2014 transferred nearly 11 petabytes of data. That, of course, does not include the requests for locally hosted copies of jQuery and to other CDNs such as Google, Microsoft, or CDNJS. No doubt the overall number of requests is in the trillions.

Even the best code project can be unusable without good documentation. Web developers don’t just tell us our documentation is good, they tell us that it’s excellent. There were 149 million page views of jQuery Foundation documentation in 2014, coming from 230 countries. All of our documentation sites are available on GitHub so that developers can open issues and make pull requests to improve them. Open source isn’t just for code, it works equally well for documentation!

The jQuery Foundation also hosted, licensed, and participated in 10 events around the world during the past year, including jQuery Conferences in San Diego, Chicago, Vienna Austria, Toronto Canada, and Oxford England. These events always include a wide variety of subjects, and are not just about projects hosted by the jQuery Foundation. The common thread in all the conferences is that they cover topics that web developers should learn in order to do their jobs well.

Future plans

This year we will continue to drive standards forward based on the needs of web developers. Our participation in groups such as EcmaScript TC39 and the W3C has given web developers a say in this process that, until recently, was primarily controlled by large for-profit companies and browser makers. We also plan to increase our participation in the Unicode Consortium as we ramp up our investment in Globalize, so that developers can easily make their software usable worldwide.

Our recent adoption of Esprima highlights another area where web developers could use some more help: development tools. The tools landscape for processing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML is incredibly fragmented. There are multiple processes for authoring, creating, modularizing, and consuming JavaScript, none of which have established themselves as a standard. There are more than a dozen package managers, each with its own unique set of advantages and drawbacks. We’d like to work with developers to settle on a smaller set of options that impose fewer burdens on both the producers and consumers of JavaScript libraries.

2014 Financial Information

Thanks to generous contributions from members and sponsors, we were able to fund a variety of activities that gave back to the cause of open source. The majority of our investments were dedicated to fostering development of jQuery Foundation projects and furthering the use of those projects through events and educational opportunities.

Acknowledgments

We’re proud of the accomplishments of the jQuery Foundation, all of which were realized by the continuing hard work of our team members. Many thanks also to the web developers who take the time to report issues, fix documentation, or contribute code patches. By improving jQuery Foundation projects, you’ve improved web development for everyone.

We’re also grateful for our jQuery Foundation members and their support. In the past year, companies such as IBM and Famo.us have joined and provided resources that allow us to accomplish our mission. Let’s all go out and do even more in 2015!

Last week, the jQuery Foundation announced our adoption of the Esprima project, the widely used JavaScript parser that powers many code analysis tools. Today we’re pleased to announce the release of version 2.0, now available on npm.

Up until now, the official releases of Esprima have only parsed ECMAScript 5 standard syntax. However, the experimental “harmony” branch has been adding ECMAScript 2015 (also popularly known as ES6) features for quite some time. A lot of the work there has been driven by Facebook. Now that the syntax for many ES6 features has stabilized and even shipped on some browsers, there is a need for tools that support the new syntax.

Esprima 2.0 introduces many stable ES6 features brought from the harmony branch, where they’ve been pretty reliable. This new baseline for Esprima makes it possible for tools such as code coverage analysis, style checkers, and linters to start to process the new ES6 syntax.

Since ES5 is likely to be with us for quite a while longer, Esprima 1.x will continue to be maintained for now in order to provide ES5-only parsing. Tools that currently use Esprima 1.x can continue to do so until they are ready and able to process ES6 constructs.

The 2.1 release of Esprima should follow relatively quickly, based on feedback on the stability of the 2.0 release. That means the Esprima team needs feedback from the makers of Esprima-based tools to know whether there are any problems. If you have built an Esprima-based tool and have problems with this release, please report them. (Note that the project is now using GitHub for issues rather than Google Code.)

We’re excited to see where Esprima goes next!

The jQuery Foundation is excited to announce that we are now hosting the Esprima project! The Abstract Syntax Tree generated by this JavaScript parser is used by many important developer tools such as ESLint, Istanbul, JSDoc and JSCS.

Ariya Hidayat has decided to transfer ownership of the Esprima project and its repo to the jQuery Foundation. We’re glad that Ariya has taken this step, since Esprima is such an important part of so many projects and is downloaded more than 2.5 million times every month from npm. Many thanks to Ariya for entrusting this project to us.

The adoption of the Esprima project, following the recent adoption of the Pointer Events polyfill, are the initial steps in a big shift toward realizing our mission to improve the open web and make it accessible to everyone. The jQuery Foundation looks to ensure that other important tools and emerging standards are also given the chance to grow and shape the open web.

The jQuery Foundation is committed to providing support to Esprima and opening it up for contributions. If you’ve been a contributor to this project already, we want you to continue that work and are always open to new contributors. Please stay tuned, we’ll be making more announcements soon.

In case you haven’t heard, Famous Industries (Famo.us) announced today that they are joining the jQuery Foundation as a Founding-level member.  Famo.us joins our other Founding-level members, WordPress and IBM, and our growing list of member companies, who recognize the power and importance of the jQuery Foundation’s open governance for JavaScript technologies.

For those who are not familiar with Famo.us, they offer a free, open source JavaScript platform that enables engineers to build beautiful, cross-platform web apps. It is the only framework that provides an open source 3D layout engine fully integrated with a 3D physics-based animation engine that can render to DOM, Canvas, or WebGL.

Famo.us also provides extensive free training, examples, and tutorials through Famo.us University. Their live coding environment allows students to see their code rendered in real time and work through topics at their own pace. We plan on taking advantage of their passion for education by partnering with Famo.us to deliver a top notch developer event in San Francisco in mid 2015 (stay tuned!).

Today, jQuery continues to be one of the most preferred JavaScript libraries available with 8 out of 10 of the top JavaScript enabled websites and over 60% of the top one million websites* choosing jQuery-enabled libraries. As our community grows and continues to innovate, so do we. This makes the support of our members more critical than ever.

We are working on a number of new initiatives: Making improvements to how our innovative technical community collaborates. Famo.us has a number of widgets they intend to make available as jQuery plugins and we look forward to taking advantage of their support and expertise as we work to improve the extended community guidance around jQuery plugins.

Famo.us developers will be joining our technical efforts so please say ‘hello’ and make them feel welcome. Co-founder and CEO Steve Newcomb has been elected to the jQuery Foundation board of directors. We look forward to benefiting from the unique perspectives, business acumen and life experiences Steve will bring to our board in helping us move forward toward accomplishing our mission.

It’s going to be a great partnership and a busy New Year. With that, please join us and give Famo.us a shout out and welcome them to the jQuery Foundation!

*stats from BuiltWith.com

Today, we’re excited to announce that Google has transferred its Pointer Events polyfill to the jQuery Foundation. This polyfill was originally written by Google’s Polymer team but since Google has chosen to put their Pointer Event implementation on hold, we engaged to ensure that the polyfill is maintained and continues to be a tool developers can use as a path to the eventual native implementation in all browsers. Many thanks to Google and the Polymer Team for allowing us to build off their work and continue development.

The jQuery Foundation has been, and continues to be a strong proponent of standards and we are specifically strong proponents of the Pointer Events standard because it will simplify the way web developers handle user interactions. Today developers are saddled with two very different event models for mouse and touch, even though they share many similarities. The result is often code that has a myriad of special cases, particularly when the device itself generates “fake” mouse events from touches. The jQuery Foundation hopes to drive developer adoption of this unified event system. Our goal is to have all browsers implement this standard natively.

Just yesterday, the W3C took the Pointer Events specification to the Proposed Recommendation stage. This makes Pointer Events one step closer to a finished standard and gives browsers a solid base on which to implement these APIs. Some browsers have even begun their implementation. Unsurprisingly Internet Explorer, where the first implementation of Pointer Events began before being submitted to the W3C for standardization, has implemented Pointer Events and Firefox has a branch of their code base implementing Pointer Events which they intend to port to all version of Firefox. Both of these implementations recently passed 100% of the Pointer Events test suite so implementation is progressing nicely.

We want to thank Microsoft Open Technologies for their hard work on Pointer Events and their continued support. We also want to thank IBM, Mozilla, Google, Dojo and the many other organizations and individuals that have helped and continue to help make developers lives easier through the creation, fostering and promotion of new standards like Pointer Events. If you want to get involved or just want to start using Pointer Events in your projects, head over to the new Pointer Events repo and check it out.