jQuery UI is growing, and I’m already seeing quite a few sites using it exclusively to support their interface. As a matter of fact, it’s growing so well, that a LA-based open-source company decided to hire a person to exclusively work on jQuery UI full-time.

I’m very happy to announce that I, Paul Bakaus, lead of jQuery UI, was hired by Liferay Inc., the company behind the world’s most popular open source java portal, to focus solely on bringing jQuery UI to a next level. This has an enormous effect to the whole project – I can now invest almost three times the amount of time and power, and I’m helping to deploy jQuery and jQuery UI in mission critical projects, which makes a huge difference.

Liferay’s plans are to standardize all their products to use jQuery and its plugins for the future (you’ll still be able to use other libraries at the same time) – it’s therefore in their very interest to see jQuery UI enjoying a long life, growing to meet expectations of all kinds of clients and beyond. To reach this goal, hiring me was the most logical decision: I now have no excuse not-to-focus on jQuery UI for a while – after all, it’s my day job!

But the cooperation with Liferay is even more than that: Liferay will be the first company starting from today to offer business critical support services for both jQuery and jQuery UI. Not only we’ll have a open source company backing us, but it’s the best publicity a project can have: jQuery UI will run in huge intranets, on every copy of Liferay. This will have a strong effect on both the distribution of the project and the level of quality that is being provided.

I myself am extremely excited about the change – there are countless positive side effects and products coming up – new products featuring jQuery, sponsored themes for UI, a new website, and of course – a new version of jQuery UI (the release date of the new, polished version with all the long-awaited bugfixes will be announced in the next couple of days).