The jQuery Foundation and Standards

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Over the years the jQuery Foundation has worked to give web developers a meaningful voice in the standards process. That’s why we’re excited to help formally establish our involvement in chapters.io, an effort that allows us to work with meetups and supporters around the globe to help developers learn more about recent standards and discuss current proposals.

Our inaugural event will be a regular forum co-organized by one of our own representatives and supported by Pittsburgh, PA’s Code and Supply and Bearded. On Tuesday, August 2nd, Brian Kardell will be presenting at Code and Supply’s regular meetup to talk more about standards and chapters. From there we’ll be organizing the first meeting. If you’re in Pittsburgh and you work on the Web, please come out. If you’re interested in hosting and organizing a meetup in your city, please open an issue on the jQuery Foundation’s standards team GitHub and we’ll try to find someone who can help coordinate.

The jQuery Foundation knows that the Web is at its best when developers are involved, but standards traditionally didn’t include that in their model. Standards were typically driven by browser makers and large companies with a significant stake in the outcome. Sometimes the standard made sense for those groups, but turned out to be less effective when deployed in the harsh reality of the Internet.

In October 2011, Addy Osmani wrote the post announcing the jQuery Standards Team on the blog, naming Yehuda Katz and Paul Irish to help represent the developer community in W3C and TC39. Over the years, numerous jQuery representatives have done a lot to advocate for developers and change the standards process for the better.

Standards have, in fact, improved a lot since then – and jQuery representatives past and present have helped at each step along the way.

In December 2012, we helped elect a slate of candidates to reform the W3C. In 2013, jQuery members like Yehuda Katz, myself (Brian Kardell), Paul Irish and Rick Waldron helped author The Extensible Web Manifesto. This document laid out a new vision for how we could re-focus standards, include the voices of developers and re-imagine a better future. Over the past couple of years, this vision has slowly become a driving force in each of the Web standards bodies. Then, in 2014, it was once again jQuery who called on the W3C’s annual meeting (TPAC) to officially adopt, support and find better ways to involve developers own voices.

The Extensible Web Manifesto is about many of the same principles that Addy expressed in that original post: It encourages standards bodies to give developers a say and create ways to tighten the feedback loop. As Addy eloquently expressed in that original post:

…How often do we all feel our voices, suggestions and ideas are heard by those groups responsible for defining these standards? The reality is that whilst many of us would like to see change, due to time restrictions and lengthy formal processes we’re unable to participate in standards discussions, get involved with writing specifications and contribute to meetings about the future of features. This makes it difficult for web developers to have a voice.

The traditional model of standards involvement does not work at scale. Millions of developers can’t fly to locations around the world for meetings, and a mailing list of millions doesn’t scale either. The aim of Chapters is to provide a conduit between developers and standards that makes it practical for everyone to be involved. If this sounds interesting, take part and get involved! Have your voice be heard!

ESLint Joins the jQuery Foundation

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After last week’s announcement that JSCS is merging with ESLint, this week the ESLint team is announcing that they are bringing their project to the jQuery Foundation. We are very excited to be the providers of a long-term, openly governed home for ESLint. We are also looking forward to seeing the outcomes of this new partnership with JSCS.

At the Foundation, we are constantly striving to find ways to make the development experience better for JavaScript developers. We believe both ESLint and JSCS have been leaders on this front. With these two incredibly bright teams coming together at the jQuery Foundation, we expect to see and support accelerated development of ESLint and an easier discovery and decision process for developers looking to bring JavaScript analysis, linting and code style checking to their projects.

Going forward, we hope to continue supporting innovation in the JavaScript space while at the same time, providing a suitable environment for collaboration in all aspects of the JavaScript development world. For more information about why ESLint chose the jQuery Foundation and how this impacts the teams and users involved, check out their announcement on the ESLint blog.

Ten Years of jQuery and Beyond

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On the 14th of January 2006, John Resig went to an event called BarCamp NYC to talk about some of the projects he was working on. One of those projects was a JavaScript Library called jQuery. It was the birth of what has become the most widely used JavaScript library ever written.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there were already about a dozen JavaScript libraries around on that day when John announced jQuery, trying to solve basically the same problem. There was no guarantee that yet another library was needed, or that jQuery would go anywhere. Yet slowly and surely over the past decade, jQuery has been widely adopted. It’s hard to find a web developer today who doesn’t know it, or a web page that doesn’t use it.

Code alone isn’t what made jQuery unique and drove its popularity. It took a strong community of users and contributors who pitched in to help newcomers master the library. John made a point of listening carefully to the community and incorporating feedback from those interactions which made both the code and documentation better. jQuery was shaped by the people who used it and appreciated the way it simplified development across multiple browsers. What makes this story even more remarkable is that it all began in an era before Github and StackOverflow!

Based on the experience and community insights that arose from jQuery development, the jQuery Foundation was formed in 2012. It included not only the jQuery projects but tools for other parts of the development lifecycle such as QUnit for testing and Globalize for internationalization. Last year, we joined with the Dojo Foundation and expanded the set of projects we support to include Dojo, Grunt, Lodash and more.

The Foundation continues to be guided by the principles that made jQuery a success and advocating for things like inclusiveness, diversity in teams and empowering contributors to lead within the open source community. As we move into 2016 and the number of projects we support grows, so do the ecosystems being built around those projects. An ecosystem thrives when its projects collaborate and share core principles. By enabling that collaboration, we hope to encourage new ideas and different points of view in open source JavaScript.

In Internet years, a decade is an eternity; web development has changed immensely in that time as has the web itself. Yet the basic formula for success in an open source project has been constant: start with a good idea, adapt it to the needs of users (even as those needs change), and get the community involved in all aspects of the project. Let’s measure our success not in the code that we write, but in what users create using our code and how it inspires them to push the web even further.

Here’s to another decade of awesome open source innovation in JavaScript!

Invest in Yourself

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You already know that jQuery Foundation projects power just about every JavaScript effort on the planet in one way or another. jQuery is the most popular library for web sites. Grunt builds the assets for thousands of projects. Lodash is used widely on both the client and server, making it the most-depended-upon package on npm. These and all the other Foundation projects could use your help.

Perhaps you hesitate to contribute to an open source project because you think, “I’m not smart, experienced, or skilled enough to do that.” Wrong! If you’re good enough to use open source, you’re good enough to contribute. What’s more, there are plenty of projects looking for a wide variety of skills. You have something to offer. As a new contributor, a new perspective alone can be incredibly valuable to those who have spent their time looking at a problem “from the inside.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about open source is that you have to be a guru-level programmer and understand how every line in the project works. That’s not true though. Many of the code-related things that need to be done involve the “code that builds the code” such as unit tests, build systems, and release scripts. If you use those tools in your work every day, you can bring that experience to help a project with those tasks, even if you’re not an expert in how it works internally.

Then there are the non-programming tasks that some programmers put off (or flat-out just can’t do), but make a huge difference in usability for developers. These are tasks like bug triage, documentation, web site design, and graphic designs. I’ve spent ten years now contributing to open source projects. The first five years were mostly spent triaging bugs, writing test cases and improving documentation. Doing these often-ignored tasks improved my understanding of the needs of project users.

Several Foundation projects have marked issues with the “help wanted” tag to make it easier for new contributors to find things the team thinks don’t require too much inside knowledge. Some projects have also tagged tasks they think are good “first contributions” for people new to the open source process. You’ll find direct links to their issues below. Take a look and grab a task, the projects will thank you for it!

QUnit
jQuery Mobile
Tessel CLI
Sizzle
Dojo 1.11
Dojo 2 core
Intern
lodash web site
lodash-cli
jQuery core
jQuery core documentation

If you don’t find a match with one of the jQuery Foundation projects, don’t let it stop you from contributing somewhere in the open source world. Sites like 24pullrequests.com can help with the search.

The jQuery Foundation would also be grateful for any contributions you’d like to make so we can continue to help open source projects grow and thrive.

Like many gifts that you can give, a contribution to open source can benefit the giver as much as the receiver. Open source software is about creating something together, where everyone contributes a bit and receives great benefits overall. In the process of helping a project you will improve your development skills, meet people with similar interests, and perhaps even hone your talents in preparation for a new job. It can take a bit of time to find the best project match for you, but the benefit to everyone will be much more than a drop in the bucket.

PEP 0.4.0

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Today, we’re happy to announce a new release of PEP: Version 0.4.0. Notable changes include better support for module bundlers such as webpack and browserify and the inclusion of a WIP build on the CDN. The WIP build can be found at http://code.jquery.com/pep/pep-git.js but should only be used for testing (please don’t deploy the WIP build to a production site).

For full details on what’s included in this release, see the changelog.

To get started with PEP, you can get the files from npm, bower (pepjs), the jQuery CDN, or the GitHub release. Check out the samples or view the project README for more details. If you run into any issues using PEP, please file an issue or join us on IRC in #pep on freenode.

Thanks to all who helped with this release, specifically: Anders D. Johnson, Colin Snover, John-David Dalton, Jörn Zaefferer, Mike Mariano, Scott González, Stefan Neubert, Stuart P. Bentley, Will Binns-Smith.

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.

snowball2

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.

Foundation Board Update – Renewed Focus on Key Priorities

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In June, the jQuery Foundation Board of Directors held an in-person meeting, hosted by Famous in their San Francisco offices. During the meeting, the Board agreed to the following priorities to fulfill the Foundation’s Mission of improving the open web, making it accessible for everyone, through the development and support of open source software, and collaboration with the development community.

Our priorities are:

  1. Diversity: Open source depends on contributions. An organization’s vitality can be destroyed by having a closed group that excludes or even actively antagonizes newcomers. There is incredible value in having a diverse set of contributors with different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. The jQuery Foundation is committed to improving diversity at all levels, from the development community in general to the projects we host and all the way to our own board, which we acknowledge isn’t very diverse today.
  2. Accessibility: As with diversity, this goal is again in the spirit of inclusiveness. Web technology has many features to make it friendly to users with sight, motor, or cognitive issues. Many web developers don’t know about them, or defeat them without realizing the implications. We want to change that. Last month’s jQuery SF conference had several excellent speakers who showed what the web can be like for some users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWzEF1P-bvI#t=7h34m30s
  3. Education: This goal crosses all of our priorities and encompasses many different subjects. By educating developers, both on the world of open source and also on the issues of diversity and accessibility, we can make the web an inclusive place.

We will achieve these goals by focusing our efforts on three key areas:

  1. Actively Recruiting New Projects: As you can tell, the jQuery Foundation’s mission goes far beyond the original jQuery projects. We are looking to host projects that we can help. The Foundation offers projects greater visibility, a voice in the standards process, help in managing their community, infrastructure such as a CDN, and other benefits. Projects remain autonomous, the Foundation doesn’t dictate the project’s goals or roadmap. We can, however, offer financial support for meeting mutually agreed upon project goals.
  2. Defining and Delivering Essential (basic through advanced) Web Developer Education: We want to help developers learn how to contribute to open source projects, how to run open source projects, and how to build web sites or applications that apply best practices and beyond that, we want to educate developers on the importance and implementation of diversity and accessibility in their projects. Finally, we want to get the word out about how the jQuery Foundation can help developers do their jobs better.
  3. Growing Our Impact through Outreach: The jQuery Foundation can only accomplish its goals with the support of companies and individuals who believe in the mission. If you or your company is interested in joining us to improve the web development community, please get in touch info@jquery.org. Like the open source projects we host, the jQuery Foundation itself is powered by memberships, volunteers and donations! Those of you who have already contributed, we thank you for supporting the mission.

jQuery Foundation Project Updates

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In order to make it easier for jQuery Foundation Members and Web developers to quickly stay abreast of all our projects, we will periodically publish consolidated project updates here.

jQuery Core

Powering 2/3 of sites, jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library

Since last December’s release, the team has been hard at work on a major 3.0 release. This release – the alpha of which came out on July 8 – comes with many updates (including Promises/A+ compliant Deferreds) and bug fixes, and it finally removes some previously deprecated and underused features.

Links: download, meeting notes, full list of 3.0 changes

A big thank you to the core team and everyone who contributed – and will contribute – to the upcoming release.
Questions?  Contact Timmy Willison

globalize-mark-light (1) Globalize

JavaScript library for internationalization and localization that leverages the official Unicode CLDR JSON data.

Globalize version 1.0 was released in April and provides developers with localized number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and parsing, relative time formatting, currency formatting, and message formatting (with pluralization and gender support) that runs in browsers and Node.js, consistently across all of them.

One exciting thing the community is focused on is the ability to compile Globalize for production. This will enable applications to generate custom runtime code that is extremely small and fast.

Links: git, mailing list,
Questions?  Contact Rafael Xavier de Souza

icn-jquerymobile-logo jQuery Mobile

Unified, HTML5-based user interface system for all popular mobile device platforms, built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation

The team has been heads down on version 1.5.0, which will bring numerous improvements including:

  • A new standalone enhancer module for customizable, fast declarative initialization of any javascript including jQuery widgets and plugins.
  • Improved and re-written shared with jQuery UI including button, checkboxradio, and controlgroup and the accordion widget which will replace the current collapsible and collapsible set widgets.
  • All of jQuery Mobile’s widget will now also feature the classes option for improved customizability and theming.
  • Re-written table and navbar widgets
  • Greatly improved modularity

Check out full release plans here

Links: download, meeting notes

Questions?  Contact Alexander Schmitz

Esprima

High performance, standard-compliant ECMAScript parser written in JavaScript

In March, we released Esprima 2.1.0, introducing support for several new pieces of ES6 syntax. In the mean time, a lot of work has been done to complete its ES6 support (check the roadmap). We’ve also improved the testing infrastructure and workflow to make the codebase more contributor-friendly.

Links: git, mailing list

A big thank you to all those who contributed patches to this release: Ariya Hidayat, Bei Zhang, Brandon Mills, Mike Rennie, Mike Sherov.

Questions?  Contact Ariya Hidayat

icn-ui-logo jQuery UI

Curated set of UI interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery Library.

The team released jQuery UI 1.11.4 in March, bringing bug fixes for Draggable, Resizable, Sortable, Accordion, Dialog, Slider, and Tooltip.

We are focused now on support for Pointer Events, and splitting up UI Core and old jQuery support to enable smaller builds

Links: git, meeting notes
Questions? Contact Scott González

ChassisChassis

Creating open standards for CSS libraries, JavaScript UI libraries, and web developers in general.

The team is working on its Phase One release which will involve an initial CSS Framework – this is planned for later this summer.

Work is also underway for a themeroller.

Links: git, meeting notes

Thanks to Micheal Arestad, Alexander Schmitz and Rohit Mulange

Questions?  Contact Sarah Frisk

qunitQUnit

Powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework

The latest release, 1.18.0, made a lot of improvements to the HTML reporter, making it more efficient to debug failures. For example, a new diff algorithm makes it easier to spot the difference in failed expected/actual assertions.

We’re currently working on the js-reporters project, which QUnit will implement, along with hopefully many other JavaScript testing frameworks and tools. The goal is to standardize an API with events and event data for test runners. A tool like Karma could then adopt a single interface instead of having to support each testing tool individually.

If you want to help moving QUnit along, check out these issues.

Links: git, meeting notes

Questions?  Contact Jörn Zaefferer

PEP

PointerEvents Polyfill: a unified event system for the web platform

PEP’s First release (0.3.0) came out in April and the the project is presently working to automate and improve the W3C test suite.

Links: git, meeting notes,

Questions?  Contact Scott González

Get Some Credit!

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Submit Your Project for the jQuery Foundation Web Excellence Program

How awesome is your project/site/integration/app? Probably really awesome, otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it, right?!?

The jQuery Foundation wants to tell the world about all the incredible things developers are doing with jQuery Foundation projects. That’s why we are launching the jQuery Foundation Web Excellence program.

Here’s how it works:

  1. You pick the category or categories in which you want to submit (See category descriptions below)
  2. Tell us about you, your company/project, and how jQuery Foundation projects help you make it happen
  3. We’ll highlight projects on the jQuery Blog and promote them on social media

What are you waiting for? Get the the visibility you and your project deserve!  Go to the Web Excellence Submission Form and submit your project today!

Category Descriptions

  • All Around Rock Star: This category highlights the sites/apps that leverage any jQuery Foundation project to produce a stellar digital experience. Please highlight your approach to leveraging jQuery Foundation tools, libraries and resources, stand-alone or in combination with other Open Web components and frameworks to solve real problems and delight users.
  • Mobile Masterpiece: This category highlights the sites/apps that use any jQuery Foundation project to engage consistently with users across all devices, including mobile.
  • Enterprise: Highlights the organizations leveraging any jQuery Foundation project to help their enterprise organization (5,000 and up employees) achieve strategic IT and/or business objectives (e.g. system integration, uptime, compatibility/accessibility, revenue, cost reduction).
  • Top Speed: Highlights the organizations that use any jQuery Foundation project as part of a rapid project/product launch and/or to achieve fast site/app performance.  Do your users have a need for speed that jQuery Foundation projects help you deliver? Tell us about it!
  • Globetrotter: Showcases the sites, apps, systems or projects that best demonstrate the power of Globalize when implemented stand-alone or in combination with other jQuery Foundation projects.
  • Powered by jQuery: Showcases the SDKs and other toolsets that leverage any jQuery Foundation project as a dependency.

Rules & Terms:

  • There is no fee to enter
  • Only English language submissions will be accepted
  • Your entry must be submitted using the Submission Form
  • Please provide box/drive links to all graphics/visuals in your text answers, so the desired placement is clear
  • You may submit for multiple categories, but please make individual submissions for each desired category
  • The jQuery Foundation reserves the right to change or cancel a category at any time
  • A selection of submitted entries will be publicly displayed on the jQuery Foundation web site and promoted via our social media channels
  • Submitting an entry gives the jQuery Foundation the permission and approval to leverage submitted content for Marketing and Public Relations purposes