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