We’d like to open up submissions for talks for our conferences in London and Boston.
The dates are currently being firmed up, but currently we’re eyeing these days: London: Sept 13-14 Sept 8-9th or the 22-23rd; Boston: Oct 16-17. Please fill out the form if you’re interested in speaking at either of these events.
We will be sharing more information about these two epic events in the coming weeks.
On Monday, July 5th, John Resig will be at the Seattle jQuery/JavaScript community meetup at Amazon’s brand new Van Vorst Meeting Center in South Lake Union for an afternoon of learning, openspace, hacking and, of course, pizza!
The fun begins at 1pm with a quick keynote and explanation of open space technology then the group will self organize into smaller sessions run in an open space style until 6pm.
There will be plenty of pizza, refreshments and networking space to meet like minded developers, so come and meet, eat, learn and play with some of the Pacific Northwest’s best front end and interface developers. Topics will be suitable for beginners all the way through to advanced jQuery and JavaScript programmers.
This awesome event is provided for free and but you need to register to get in. Be sure to get your ticket quick.
Microsoft has submitted it’s second proposal to the jQuery Project outlining a plugin that allows properties within objects to be linked to each other. Termed “data linking”, the new plugin would allow changes made to a property of one object to effect a change on the property of a secondary object. The plugin leverages jQuery’s “special events” API to create a new event that will trigger when a change occurs on a bound object property. This would allow a developer to link properties in the following way:
var person = {};
$(“#name”).linkTo(“val”, person, “name”);
$(“#name”).val(“foo”);
alert(person.name); // foo
// … user changes value …
alert(person.name); // user typed value
The proposal has been submitted via the jQuery forums and Microsoft is actively soliciting community feedback:
http://forum.jquery.com/topic/proposal-for-adding-data-linking-to-jquery
A prototype of the data linking is available for review via Github:
http://github.com/nje/jquery-datalink
We’re pleased to see Microsoft’s continued contribution to our open source community and ask that you provide feedback in guiding this effort along.
The jQuery Project is excited to announce that Microsoft is expanding its support of the jQuery JavaScript Library through new initiatives, to include code contributions, product integration, and the allocation of additional resources.
Building on two years of collaboration with the jQuery Project, Microsoft announced today at MIX 2010 that it will be working with the jQuery Core Team and community to provide source code that will help to further advance the jQuery JavaScript Library. The planned contributions target specific functionalities in areas of mutual interest. They include:
The initial focus will be on a new templating engine that will allow for easy and flexible data rendering via defined templates. Microsoft has submitted a proposal for public review along with an experimental plugin, and is actively collaborating with the jQuery team and community on a unified implementation. The templating engine will be reviewed and considered for inclusion into the jQuery JavaScript Library or maintained as an official jQuery plugin.
Microsoft will also ship a current release of the jQuery JavaScript Library in both Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC as well as continue to host current versions of the library on the Microsoft CDN.
Lastly, Microsoft will be providing resources to assist in QA testing of jQuery in new environments to ensure continued stability and longevity of the library.
We see these contributions as a tremendous benefit to the jQuery effort and community and look forward to continued collaboration with Microsoft.
The jQuery Project is very excited to announce the dates for our first-ever San Francisco Bay Area conference. The conference will be held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Research Center in Mountain View, California on April 24th and 25th, 2010.
The San Francisco Bay Area conference is the second of four events planned by the jQuery Project in 2010. The first was the jQuery14 event, and additional conferences are being planned in Europe and on the East Coast for later this year.
This venue is the largest that the project has worked with to date (Harvard Law School in ‘07, the MIT Stata Center in ‘08 and Microsoft New England Research Center in ’09) and we expect to sell out very quickly.
Registration is currently scheduled to open on Wednesday, March 17th; tickets will be priced at $199. In addition to General Admission tickets, we’re offering a limited number of discounted student tickets priced at $99, with a valid student ID.
Watch the jQuery blog or jQuery Twitter feed for notification when registration opens.
A brief synopsis of some of the content that you’ll be able to expect:
In addition to two days of jQuery sessions, for the first time we’ll be adding an additional day of jQuery training, prior to the main event. The training will be provided by appendTo and focused on helping you and your team get up to speed on jQuery prior to attending the conference. The training will cover the following topics:
The training will be held on April 23rd at the Microsoft San Francisco offices in downtown San Francisco; tickets will cost $299. All proceeds from training go to the jQuery Project.
Interested in speaking? Please fill out our call for speaking submissions form and watch the jQuery Blog for updates.
jQuery 1.4.2 is now out! This is the second minor release on top of jQuery 1.4, fixing some outstanding bugs from the 1.4 release and landing some nice improvements.
I would like to thank the following people that provided patches for this release: Ben Alman, Justin Meyer, Neeraj Singh, and Noah Sloan.
As usual, we provide two copies of jQuery, one minified (we now use the Google Closure Compiler as the default minifier) and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).
You can feel free to include the above URLs directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.
Additionally you can also load the URLs directly from either Google or Microsoft’s CDNs:
A full list of the API changes can be found in the 1.4.2 category on the jQuery API site.
In this release we’ve added two new methods: .delegate() and .undelegate(). These methods serve as complements to the existing .live() and .die() methods in jQuery. They simplify the process of watching for specific events from a certain root within the document.
For example:
$("table").delegate("td", "hover", function(){
$(this).toggleClass("hover");
});
This is equivalent to the following code written using .live():
$("table").each(function(){
$("td", this).live("hover", function(){
$(this).toggleClass("hover");
});
});
Additionally, .live() is roughly equivalent to the following .delegate() code.
$(document).delegate("td", "hover", function(){
$(this).toggleClass("hover");
});
There has been some large code rewrites within this release, both for performance and for fixing long-standing issues.
As is the case with virtually every release of jQuery: We’ve worked hard to continue to improve the performance of the code base, making sure that you’re provided with the best performing JavaScript code possible.
According to the numbers presented by the Taskspeed benchmark we’ve improved the performance of jQuery about 2x compared to jQuery 1.4.1 and about 3x compared to jQuery 1.3.2.
Specifically we’ve improved the performance of 4 areas within jQuery:
$("body"). (Commit)While comprehensive benchmarks like Taskspeed can be interesting if deconstructed into individual sub-tests for further study, as a project we tend to stay away from using them as an accurate measure of true, overall, library performance. Considering how many aspects make up a library, not to mention the different techniques that they offer, cumulative results rarely reflect how an actual user may use a library.
For example, we saw significant overall performance speed-ups in Taskspeed simply by optimizing the $("body") selector because it’s called hundreds of times within the tests. Additionally we saw large gains by optimizing .bind() and .unbind() by a fraction of a millisecond – an inconsequential amount – especially considering that any cases where you would bind hundreds of events you would likely want to use .live() or .delegate() instead.
We’ve collected some results from the other major libraries as well but are less interested in those results and far more interested in the performance improvements that we’ve made relative to older versions of jQuery itself.
We will continue to work on optimizing the jQuery code base – indefinitely. It’s always a major concern for us to try and provide the fastest JavaScript/DOM-development experience possible. And yes, there will likely always be ways to gain additional performance – either through internal optimizations or by pushing critical functionality off into browser-land for standardization.
The largest internal changes have come through a much-needed structural rewrite of the events module. Many quirky issues related to event binding have been resolved with these fixes.
Namely event handlers are no longer stored as object properties in jQuery’s internal object store (with metadata attached to the handlers). Instead they’re now stored within an internal array of objects.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to play around with .data("events") on a jQuery element you would find that it returns an object with all the event types currently bound, within it.
To enumerate some of the changes that have occurred during this rewrite:
As a side-effect of these changes we had to change the newly-exposed special add/special remove APIs in order to accommodate the new event data objects. Ben Alman is in the process of writing up a large tutorial on jQuery’s special event system and we will be making additional announcements when that occurs.
There were a total of 40 tickets closed in this minor release. Some relating to differences between jQuery 1.3.2 and jQuery 1.4.x, some fixing long-standing issues (like in the case of the event module rewrite).
Raw Data
This is the raw data that we collected to generate the aforementioned charts.
jQuery 1.3.2 jQuery 1.4.1 jQuery 1.4.2 Prototype 1.6.1 MooTools 1.2.4 Dojo 1.4.1 YUI 3.0.0 FF 3.5 2182 806 565 2156 1073 575 1885 FF 3.6 1352 677 519 2067 857 750 1494 Opera 983 697 222 793 678 218 1201 Safari 610 435 252 315 235 238 612 Chrome 1591 703 293 271 312 222 745 IE 8 2470 1937 1141 3045 4749 1420 2922 IE 7 4468 3470 1705 9863 10034 1737 5830 IE 6 6517 4468 2110 13499 11453 2202 7295
In case you’re not following along with the 14 days of jQuery, here’s a summary of what has been released thus far.
We still have 7 more days of jQuery 1.4 to come with more video’s and more releases to announce.
Again, events like these are not possible without support from our great sponsors and from you, the jQuery Community. We’d like to thank everyone who has donated so far, and we’d like to remind everyone that you will receive a free ebook with the donation of $20 or more throughout the 14 Days of jQuery.
Media Template Giveaway
Each day during the 14 days of jQuery, a web developer will receive a free (gs) Grid-Service account for one year from the jQuery Project’s web hosting provider, Media Temple. A grand prize winner will receive a 13″ MacBook Pro!
In order to enter the contest, you must submit a link to your coolest use of jQuery. A winner will be chosen each day during the 14 Days of jQuery. The grand prize winner will be announced on Friday, January 29th.
Check the Media Template Giveaway webpage for more details about the contest and to see the announced daily winners. There are only 7 days left, so enter now!
Check out jQuery Enlightenment!
jQuery team member Cody Lindley has published the jQuery Enlightenment book, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you’ll definitely want to. “Each chapter contains concepts essential to becoming a seasoned jQuery developer,”‘” so even if you’ve already got your copy, pick one up for a friend who’s just learning! Even better, a percentage of all sales goes directly back to the jQuery project and helps fund future releases and projects. A big thank you to Cody for his generous donation for the 14 Days of jQuery campaign!
Big News: jQuery 1.4 has been released! Head on over to the 14 Days of jQuery site to see the full details:
Also Media Temple has just started their 15 prizes for 14 days of jQuery contest. Submit cool uses of jQuery and enter to win free hosting or even a laptop!
It’s the start of a new year, and the jQuery team’s been hard at work. We’ve been up day and night working to crank out the upcoming jQuery 1.4 release, and there’s a LOT to announce! So much, in fact, that we’ll need fourteen full days to get it all out there… As such, I’d like to announce The 14 Days of jQuery 1.4!
Beginning on January 14th, we’ll start a fourteen-day event. Each day we’ll have fresh videos and announcements — there’ll be code releases, project-related updates, and jQuery UI goodness, among other things. In addition to the announcements, we’ll also be releasing a set of videos over the 14 days with talks and tutorials relating the jQuery 1.4 release and other general jQuery topics. You’ll want to check back at jQuery14.com every day during the two weeks to see what’s new, or sign up to be notified via email. Think of it like an online conference, only longer, freer, and with a bit of mystery and suspense!
But Wait, There’s More!
We’ve got a lot planned for January 14th, but it seemed good to whet your appetite and pre-release some tasty jQuery morsels. Head over to jQuery14.com to learn all about the brand-new jQuery API site:
Be sure to subscribe to the jQuery14.com site or to the @jquery Twitter account for all the updates during these upcoming weeks.
Free Books, Anyone?
The jQuery project is a non-profit, open-source effort, and we rely heavily on donations and contributions to help fund everything we do. We’ll be running a fundraising drive starting now and throughout the 14 Days of jQuery. If you’re a jQuery user, show your support by making a tax-deductible donation of $20 USD or more to the project during the event, and you’ll receive a free jQuery book with your donation.
It’s always important to mention that much of this would not be possible without the help of the jQuery project sponsors; Netflix, JupiterIT Consulting, appendTo, Fusionary Media and Oxide Design Co have all signed on as official sponsors of the 14 Days of jQuery 1.4, along with our favorite jQuery book publishers, Manning, Packt, jQuery Enlightenment, and O’Reilly.
That’s it for now — head on over to jQuery14.com for much more to come!