jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation

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Happy Birthday to jQuery! jQuery is three years old today, after being released way back on January 14th, 2006 at the first BarCampNYC by John Resig.

We have four announcements for you today, we hope you’ll enjoy them!

jQuery 1.3

First, we have an excellent new release of jQuery ready for you to enjoy. The big features of this release are:

  • Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine.
  • Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist.
  • jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling.
  • HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending.
  • Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation.
  • No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.

The full details of the release can be found in the release notes:
http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3

We’re currently planning on a follow-up jQuery 1.3.1 release sometime within the next week or two to catch any straggling bugs that might’ve slipped through. If you spot any bugs please be sure to submit them to the bug tracker.

Sizzle

jQuery has a brand new CSS selector engine – nicknamed ‘Sizzle‘. You can read the full details behind it in the jQuery 1.3 Release Notes (including performance numbers).

More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers. We saw an opportunity to give something back to not just the jQuery community but to the JavaScript development community as a whole; and at the same time be able to collaborate with developers of other libraries on a single, unified, selector engine. We feel that there’s too much competition and not enough collaboration occurring and so we put our code out on the line as a good first step towards working together.

As a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve turned over Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation (an excellent non-profit well suited for this project, not to be confused with the Dojo Toolkit). We wanted a common meeting ground where all developers would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.

Our request for collaboration has already seen an amazing resopnse: Developers from Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, MochiKit, and TinyMCE (and many other projects) have all shown interest in refining Sizzle to perfection.

A rough Sizzle project page can be found here:
http://sizzlejs.com/

Along with the full source code:
http://github.com/jeresig/sizzle/tree/master

New API Browser

Along with the release of jQuery 1.3, I’m pleased to present the new API browser, developed by Remy Sharp, available at: http://api.jquery.com/.

jQuery API Browser
This is an alternative view to the existing jQuery API that should be easy to navigate and use.

The new API browser includes the following features:

  • All the latest jQuery and jQuery UI documentation.
  • The ability to mark pages as favorites for those pages you keep wanting to return to.
  • Syntax highlighting in the code examples
  • Live running of examples within the browser
  • Links to edit and experiment with the code examples

Most importantly though, the API browser is also available offline as an Adobe AIR application (thanks to Tane Piper’s AIR framework). The interface looks and works the same, and includes an auto-update mechanism, so you’ll always be up to date.

Download and install the AIR API browser

If you find problems please submit a bug to the bug tracker under the ‘site’ component.

Which leads us to the last, and certainly not the least important, point…

jQuery Foundation

With the jQuery Project growing at a tremendous rate, it was important for us, as a team, to take a step back and determine how the project’s ownership should be handled. Currently, John Resig, jQuery’s founder and lead developer, and Paul Bakaus, lead developer for jQuery UI, both maintain ownership of their respective projects. This posed several concerns from a practical and legal perspective as it enjoined two individuals as the owners of the projects instead of a formal organization. As more individuals and corporations started contributing to the projects, these concerns became even more evident causing confusion as to who were the correct copyright holders for specific units of work.

After meeting up to talk at the recent jQuery Conference, we decided to really make a concerted effort to fix this and determine how we could shift ownership of the jQuery projects to a foundation-type organization that would:

1. Understand the nature of open-source software development.
2. Allow us to continue to manage the project unhindered.
3. Ensure that the projects continue to live on regardless of who is involved in the effort.

After examining many options we came to a final conclusion – and we’re excited to announce that the Software Freedom Conservancy has extended the jQuery project an invitation to join the non-profit organization and continue developing software under its auspices. By joining The Software Freedom Conservancy, the jQuery projects and community immediately realize some important benefits:

1. It allows the current project members to continue to manage the projects and maintain ultimate responsibility for the direction of current and future efforts.
2. It allows the projects to be considered a true non-profit efforts allowing us to be able to accept donations and contributions without incurring tremendous personal financial liability.
3. The copyright of the code will be assigned to the conservancy thus ensuring that no single person will own contributions or assets of the project.
4. It may allow corporations to write off time when an employee contributes to a project.
5. Most importantly, it ensures that the jQuery projects will always be open and free software.

This is a big step in formalizing the jQuery projects and an important accomplishment in ensuring that the investment being made by the jQuery community is protected. We’ll be making the transition into the conservancy over the coming weeks. There will be very little, to no, change in how the project will run. The jQuery Team will still run and manage the project and we’re still going to work hard to build the best JavaScript library possible. If anything this will help to free up some of our time so that we can spend more time coding – and who doesn’t like the sound of that?

Happy 3rd birthday, jQuery!

103 thoughts on “jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation”

  1. Sean Catchpole on said:

    An amazing release with lots of great improvements. I’m so happy about the DOM creation and injection speedups. New API looks and works great Remy, mad props. Thank you all for working so hard on this major release.

  3. Bart Deslagmulder on said:

    Happy birthday jQuery!

    A big thank you goes to the whole jQuery team + contributors!

  4. travis on said:

    great release…is there also going to be a visual studio intellisense update? if so, any idea when?

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  17. Zwyzki on said:

    Thanks for the great write up and congratulations on 1.3! Too bad about deprecating browser sniffing. I do browser sniffing to direct users on how to do something on their particular browser, for example, how to disable pop-up blockers. This has nothing to do if a browser supports a certain feature.

  18. Jorn on said:

    Happy birthday, sweetest Javascript framework. Goddess bless you all.

    Lame aesthetic request: Could we please have the jQuery logo favicon.ico on the API browser site?

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  20. Steve on said:

    Tabs don’t appear to work when I use the new version.

    Works fine with 1.2.6

    Where do we report bugs – tabs are a part of 1.5.3

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  25. Mohammed Arif on said:

    Congrats jQuery Team!

    You really changed the JavaScript world; any one can smell it since the inception of jQuery 3 years back, nonetheless to say that best JS library ever written on this earth and it’s becoming more mature day by day.

    Keep rocking guys!

    Thanks
    Mohammed Arif
    http://www.mohammedarif.com

  28. Charlie22 on said:

    Happy Birthday and big thanks for your excellent work!!
    I have a little problem with this page under IE7. Page is unreadable. With FiereFox it works OK.

    Charlie22

  29. Martin on said:

    Hi,

    great work – and happy breleaseday :)
    Unfortunately I too have problems with the UI Tab (V 1.5.2 and 1.5.3) like Steve mentioned before.

    The binded ‘tabsselect’ event fires but i can’t get any tab information which i got with

    var tabid = String(ui.tab);

    before in the 1.2.1 Version.

    Best regards
    Martin

  30. Beto on said:

    Congratulations! Jquery again prove that collaborate is better than competition (with others javascript frameworks).
    Now everybody can win together.

  33. Dan H on said:

    Happy Birthday!

    Love the new API website! Looks great, very easy to navigate – really nice work!

  34. Zhille on said:

    The API is a bliss! THANK YOUUU!!!! I love it, it’s fast, full of good concise explanations and examples. An excellent tool for jQ beginners :)

  36. Libor on said:

    great job guys
    jQuery has showed me that client side scripting might be easy and enjoyable

  37. Richard on said:

    Congratulations on the new release!

    One problem with removing the browser sniffing is that it makes it harder to work around IE bugs. For example, when manipulating a select list with optgroup tags, every other browser works with “group.appendChild(option)”, but IE7 fails and needs “options.add(option, index)” instead.

  39. Jason Hummel on said:

    I think I found a typo in the jQuery docs: in Utilities > Array and Object operations > $.grep

    The example says:
    “Filters the original array of numbers leaving that are not 5 and have an index greater than 3. Then it removes all 9s while inverting it.”

    I don’t believe the code is inverting the array, unless I’m misunderstanding something – it’s just removing the 9s.

  41. thomtom on said:

    Hello. In the previous version, chrome was not in the class browser, can you add it to the jQuery compressed? The line of code was added after “mozilla: /mozilla/.test( userAgent ) && !/(compatible|webkit)/.test( userAgent )” is :
    “chrome : /chrome/.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase()) ” .
    Thank you.
    Good day.

    (sorry for my english, i’m french ^^)

  43. R.S. Oldenbeuving on said:

    @ Shandercage
    The ‘@’ in [@attr] has been removed. Deprecated since 1.2 this old syntax no longer works. Simply remove the @ to upgrade. More Information

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  45. Rich Paul on said:

    This is great stuff! Here’s to another 3+ years of awesomeness.

    Now, could I make a suggestion for the AIR API browser? Could you make the categories more like an accordion? So, instead of clicking “Manipulation” then “Removing” then having to click “removing” again to go up a level, you’d have all the sections underneath a category available to expand. I’m sure it was for space considerations, but there are too many clicks.

    I really like the filter function, though!

  46. envy on said:

    I love jquery, but your site does not load correct in IE7.0.6001.18000

    The content like the entire article spills over the template, making it un-readable as the dark text is on the dark background of the page.

  47. thomtom on said:

    Hello

    Can you add this script in browser class :
    language: navigator.language? navigator.language : navigator.userLanguage;

    Thank you.
    Good day.

  48. Sean on said:

    Kudos to jquery – anyone note the extensive use on the revamped White House site? (http://www.whitehouse.gov)

    Regardless of ones political affiliation, it is great to see jquery being utilized by an administration that prides itself on it’s tech savvy and use of forward-thinking communication technology.

    I for one have been trying to figure out how to put together a slideshow component like the one they are using on the home page – looks like they are chaining together a few plugins – jcarousel, galleria and cycle to name a few.

    Would love to see a tutorial on putting together something like this.