Hey everybody,

The jQuery team is proud to release the first beta release of the new upcoming version of UI, jQuery UI 1.5! It has been a long path to this release – originally intended to be a bugfix release, it was growing into something we just couldn’t call 1.0.1, not even 1.1, no, it’s so damn delicious we had to call it 1.5.

jQuery UI 1.5 is a complete overhaul of the library – many of the components have been completely rewritten from scratch to improve overall stability and performance, and we finally managed to settle on a unified API for all components. So let’s get straight to a list of all the changes:

Unified API

The API has been updated for all UI components. It should now be very easy to use other plugins if you’re familiar with one of them. There is only one exposed method for every plugin – All other methods are called by passing in a String into the exposed method, the initialization of the plugin works by giving on a options hash as first argument. You can now change and get all options at a later point if you want to by using the new data method. Basic example for draggables:


$(..).draggable({...}); //Initialize the draggable
$(..).draggable("disable"); //Disable the draggable
$(..).data("cursor.draggable", "move") //Change the cursor during drag to 'move'


Updated and revised documentation

The documentation in the jQuery Wiki has been completely updated to reflect the recent changes. We also made sure all callbacks and its arguments are documented this time.

Drag & Drop: Snapping, Relative dragging

Draggables and Droppables have been completely refactored. It might now be the most non-destructive drag & drop implementation ever: The css position’s value will not be changed except for ‘static’: That means that elements, that were static or relative, will not be forced into absolute positioning, which often destroyed layouts, especially when dealing with floats.

Some options have been renamed to better be recognized: preventionTimeout becomes delay, preventionDistance becomes distance.

Also, a new option plugin has been added: The snap plugin. Remember the docking Winamp windows? Yes, you can do that now with UI draggables – just set “snap” to a selector to select all elements you want to snap to and you’re ready to go. Of course, you can also configure it to your needs using snapTolerance and snapMode.

Slider: Ranges, multiple handles and accessibility

The slider wasn’t refactored, but has been completely rewritten from scratch. While it’s still almost backwards compatible, it’s now very stable and simpler than ever: The moveTo method now only takes two arguments: The value you want to move the handle to and optionally the index of the handle you want to move. Want to retrieve a specific handle value? No problem, just call $(..).slider(“value”, index) .

Even better, the slider now is completely keyboard accessible: You can now tab and focus each slider handle seperately and move its position using the left/right keys. We also improved support for using the mouse: Clicking into a empty area now moves the focused handle to the clicked position, regardless on how many handles you have.

For those of you searching for advanced usage, the slider now supports ranges: Just set the option “range” to true and make sure you have two handles, and the script will create a visible range between these two sliders that can be styled individually. The script even makes sure that you cannot create negative ranges.

Sortables: Connected sortables, serialization and more

Rewritten as well, the sortables now support a wide range of features you already know from draggables: cursor, zIndex, revert, opacity, axis, handles, containment and scrolling. Additional to that, you can now serialize your items to a url hash, and you now have the often requested ability to connect multiple sortables, so you can drag a node from one sortable to another.

and there’s more!

This is just an excerpt of the plugins I personally was involved in – the final release will come with an official changelog – but most of the other plugins have been refactored as well, with tons of new features in datepicker, tabs, accordion, resizables and more.

..and less!

Preparing for our sister library Enchant, we removed the magnifier and the shadow plugin and moved it to Enchant. Worry not, you can find them in our SVN trunk under trunk/fx. Additionally, the table sorter component has been removed because of API and roadmap incompabilities. There will soon be a grid component that includes most of its functionality.

…and countless bugfixes

We could have made it easy for us, just rewrite everything and delete all bug tickets of 1.0 because it’s not possible to track down anymore, but we did not: All issues coming in for the 1.0 release have been adressed and solved.

For everything that has changed in this release, please consult the documentation or look for it in the code. Remember this is a beta release – expect things to be buggy and unstable (but better than 1.0 :P ). Also, you would do us a great favor if you report any issues to our bug tracker.

Now go ahead and grab it here: http://ui.jquery.com or directly from our google code page: jquery.ui-1.5b.zip. For this release, we deactivated the downloader – so please download the zip package and include what you need. You can read about the dependancies in the documentation.

Thanks to all the contributors who made this release possible – I will thank each of you individually in the final release notes, I’m too lazy and too tired to do it twice :)

See you again in about two weeks!

We’re happy to announce a brand new release of jQuery. This is primarily a bug fix release for jQuery 1.2. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

Downloading

jQuery 1.2.3:

• jQuery Minified (15kb with Gzipping)
• jQuery Packed (29kb)
• jQuery Regular (94kb)

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/1.2.3

Important Changes

The primary purpose of this release was to fix a couple outstanding bugs from the jQuery 1.2.2 release. Specifically, this release is now compatible with Adobe AIR, will be included in Drupal 6, and will be the base for jQuery UI 1.5. Additionally, a couple minor features, for plugin developers, were included in this release.

.data() and .removeData()

These methods complement the, already included, jQuery.data and jQuery.removeData methods introduced in jQuery 1.2. The important change, however, is that they’ve been tailored for plugin developers. You can now namespace data additions – like you can with event binding/unbinding. For example:

  $("div").data("test", "original");
  $("div").data("test.plugin", "new data");
  alert( $("div").data("test") == "original" ); // true
  alert( $("div").data("test.plugin") == "new data" ); // true

Additionally, getting or setting data values can be overridden by a plugin. For example, the following code is from the, recently updated, draggables in jQuery UI:

  $(element).bind("setData.draggable", function(event, key, value){
     self.options[key] = value;
  }).bind("getData.draggable", function(event, key){
     return self.options[key];
  });

The above makes it such that all attempts to get and set draggable-namespaced data will be intercepted and handled by the plugin directly (rather than being bound directly to the element). The result is a powerful new interface for dealing with internalized data within a plugin.

.unbind(“.namespace”)

In jQuery 1.2 you could add and remove namespaced events, however you always had to include a name for the type of event being used. With this addition you can now remove all bound events that match a particular namespace, for example:

  $("div").bind("click.plugin", function(){});
  $("div").bind("mouseover.plugin", function(){});
  $("div").unbind(".plugin"); // All handlers removed

The above removes all bound event handlers that are within the “plugin” namespace.

.trigger(“click!”)

Finally, a new addition was included to allow exclusion of namespaced events from being triggered. For example:

  $("div").bind("click", function(){ alert("hello"); });
  $("div").bind("click.plugin", function(){ alert("goodbye"); });
  $("div").trigger("click!"); // alert("hello") only

The above only triggers the non-namespaced event handlers.

Alpha Release: jQuery UI 1.5 and jQuery Enchant 1.0

Last, but not least, we’re pleased to announce a new alpha release of jQuery UI. This is an overhaul of the existing code base with tons of a bug fixes and API tweaks. We need a ton of help testing this alpha, making sure that it’ll be rock-solid for the upcoming release candidate. Please participate in the discussion, helping us to get ready.

Additionally, we’re working on a new plugin called jQuery Enchant which will bring a ton of advanced effects to the library (like clip, shake, and explode – to name a few). This is an alpha release of this plugin, as well – so please help us test it and make sure that it’s completely up to the jQuery level of quality.

Download

• jQuery UI 1.5 (Alpha) (Requires jQuery 1.2.3 or higher)
• jQuery Enchant 1.0 (Alpha)

Demos

• jQuery UI 1.5 (Alpha)
• jQuery Enchant 1.0 (Alpha)

Enjoy!

Paul Bakaus (jQuery UI Lead) and John Resig (jQuery Lead) working on
the next release of jQuery UI (1.5) and jQuery Core (1.2.3).

It’s a rare treat, in distributed Open Source development, to be able to work face-to-face with a fellow developer. Paul is located in Germany, I in Boston – and much of the jQuery team is scattered around the globe. He stopped into town for the weekend so that we could make sure that all the necessary code was in jQuery core for the upcoming jQuery UI 1.5 release candidate. We also had a chance to discuss the future of jQuery UI and plan out some of the best resource allocations for the upcoming months.

All that being said, this next release is going to be fantastic. It’s what jQuery UI 1.0 should have been. It’s been rough because of all the constraints on developer time that were in place when we first set out with this project, but it’s been getting better. Paul now works on jQuery UI full-time – and Liferay is putting a ton of resources towards making sure that the future of the library will be successful. It’s really exciting to see this project grow up and start to see some light.

jQuery 1.2.3 should be released within the next couple days (after some more testing) and jQuery UI 1.5rc1 will be announced on the jQuery UI mailing list at about that time.

Reposted from my blog.