jQuery Foundation Web Excellence Program – Powered by jQuery

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Snowball: A Tool for Storytelling on the Web

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openHTML Research Group

Tell us about your organization

Our openHTML group at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA researches how people learn about computation through the web, and ways we can design tools to support these learning experiences. Snowball is our latest project for giving people a way to express themselves using the web as a medium.

What is Snowball and how does it help advance the Open Web?null

Snowball is a WordPress plugin that makes it possible for anyone to create modern, immersive, interactive articles to tell their stories on the web. Our goal is to make it possible for everyone including bloggers, students, and journalists to create engaging articles like the ones produced by world-class news organizations.

We provide a graphical interface where you can start building the content of your article block by block. Within each block, you can tinker with the widgets to add your own content and style. Each block also has a coding interface so you can inspect the underlying HTML and CSS, and add a dash of your own to customize even further. We provide blocks ranging from third-party media embeds to interactive visualizations.

What are the benefits of including jQuery as a dependency in Snowball?

jQuery ensures that we can provide a uniform experience across a broad range of devices and platforms, freeing our time to spend on what makes our project unique.

How do jQuery projects help Snowball and its users achieve your and their goals?

jQuery has accelerated the pace of our development, allowing us to build a functional prototype in less than two months. In turn, this has allowed us to start getting feedback, and iterating on our design, sooner rather than later.

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What’s coming next in Snowball?

We’re partnering with The Triangle, Drexel University’s student-run newspaper, to pilot Snowball for long-form articles. This will teach us a great deal about how journalists work the web and how we can make our tool more useful for them. We’re also in the process of getting Snowball listed on WordPress.org’s plugin directory so that it’s available to everyone.

How can people get involved?

If any news organization or educators are interested in trying Snowball, we’d love to partner with you. We’re also open source and on GitHub. If you know HTML, CSS, and jQuery, you know enough to contribute new block types in Snowball!

Are you involved with an amazing site or app that uses a jQuery Foundation project or projects? Check out the Web Excellence Program categories and submit yours today! Entries in all categories are heartily welcomed, and we’d love to hear how individual developers all the way to Enterprises use jQuery Foundation projects to achieve their business and technology goals.

jQuery Foundation and Dojo Foundation to Merge

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United Foundation to Advance the Open Web by Serving Developers

The jQuery Foundation and Dojo Foundation today announce plans to combine forces to form the largest, most diverse and most comprehensive Foundation committed to building the Open Web by serving developers, their projects and their communities.

“This merger elevates Web accessibility, openness and developer education, and will advance the Open Web and improve the developer experience significantly,” said Kris Borchers, jQuery Foundation Executive Director. “Every Open Source project needs community, governance and technical resources to succeed. By joining forces, we make growing community easier, we streamline and simplify processes and we offer unrivaled resources to projects and developers alike.”

“The Dojo Foundation project leads and I are all very excited to be joining up with the jQuery Foundation,” said the Dojo Foundation President Dylan Schiemann, who will join the jQuery Foundation board with the merger. “We share a common mission, purpose and approach, and our combined ability to serve the needs of the JavaScript development community is going to take the Open Web to new heights.”

Timmy Willison, jQuery Core Project Lead, agreed, adding, “I’m a big fan of Dojo projects and the Dojo Foundation. I am excited and honored to work alongside such capable, talented developers and I look forward to discovering what we can achieve together.”

“Some of the most innovative developer ideas are coming out of the JavaScript community and our clients see a great deal of value from it,” said Todd Moore, Vice President IBM Open Technology. “We are excited to see the jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation joining forces in an open collaborative developer oriented environment.”?

Said James Burke, Project Lead for RequireJS, “I have contributed to projects that have been under both Foundations, and I appreciate how both make it easy for people to start contributing in a welcoming environment by keeping the legal and mechanical processes as low-friction as possible. Both Foundations are also committed to creating maximally-useful code through very permissive Open Source means. By combining their efforts, I believe it will be easier for new projects to choose this successful approach.”

John-David Dalton, Lo-Dash project lead, added, “Combining the resources of the Dojo and jQuery Foundations is a win for developers. Among the many advantages this merger will bring, consolidating CLAs and streamlining processes will make it much easier for projects to grow and better serve the application developer community.”

With this merger, the jQuery Foundation continues to move toward its mission to make the web accessible to everyone. By adding the projects of the Dojo Foundation to the family of projects it supports, the Foundation is able to reach a larger community of developers in its efforts to increase diversity and accessibility in its projects and the open web as a whole. This is just the first major step in the jQuery Foundation’s plans to further serve developers.