jQuery 1.4.3 Release Candidate 1 Released

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jQuery 1.4.3 Release Candidate 1 is released! This is the first release candidate of jQuery 1.4.3. The code is stable (passing all tests in all browsers we support), feature-complete (we’re no longer accepting new features for the release), and needs to be tested in live applications.

Grab the code:

NOTE: If you’re using jQuery 1.4.3rc1 and you run into an error please make sure that you’re using the regular version of the code, it’ll make it easier to spot where the error is occurring.

How can I help?

To start, try dropping the above un-minified version of jQuery 1.4.3rc1 into a live application that you’re running. If you hit an exception or some weirdness occurs immediately login to the bug tracker and file a bug. Be sure to mention that you hit the bug in jQuery 1.4.3rc1!

We’ll be closely monitoring the bug reports that come in and will work hard to fix any inconsistencies between jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery 1.4.3.

What to Watch For

There are a few areas in jQuery that have seen extensive changes since 1.4.2 was released:

  • .css() and related css-handling methods were all overhauled.
  • Logic for determining element visibility and toggling of display in animation code.
  • Much of the traversing logic has been improved and changed (is, filter, closest, find).

Full details concerning the release are forthcoming – for now we just need your help in catch regressions.

With your input we should be able to produce a solid release. Right now we’re looking to get the final 1.4.3 release out in time for the jQuery Conference in Boston this next weekend. Thanks for your help in reviewing jQuery 1.4.3rc1!

New Official jQuery Plugins Provide Templating, Data Linking and Globalization

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As the jQuery project has grown, so have the needs of the developer community. As a project, we’re focused on building the best features possible and providing them in a reliable and open manner. Like most open-source projects, the software we’re able to offer is in no small part due to the generosity of many volunteers who donate their time and coding skills to make jQuery and jQuery UI some of the most widely used JavaScript libraries available.

In March, we announced at MIX 2010 that Microsoft had committed to supporting the jQuery Project via code contributions and resources. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft made available for public review their first jQuery plugin which provided client-side templating capabilities to the jQuery community. This was soon followed by their second plugin, jQuery Data Link, which offered data synchronization capabilities and, most recently, the jQuery Globalization plugin which offers globalization information to JavaScript applications for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English.

During the seven months of development, the jQuery and Microsoft teams worked closely to ensure that the code conformed to the best practices specified by the jQuery project and filled specific needs of the jQuery community. We also ensured that any code contributed would be available to the jQuery community under the same non-restrictive licensing terms as the jQuery JavaScript Library.

Official jQuery Plugins

Today, we’re very happy to announce that the following Microsoft-contributed plugins – the jQuery Templates plugin, the jQuery Data Link plugin, and the jQuery Globalization plugin – have been accepted as officially supported plugins of the jQuery project. As supported plugins, the jQuery community can feel confident that the plugins will continue to be enhanced and compatible with future versions of the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries.

The jQuery Templates and jQuery Datalink plugin will be managed by the jQuery Core team while the jQuery Globalization plugin will become part of the jQuery UI project, allowing for extended globalization functionality for our rich UI library. In addition, the functionality found in the jQuery Templates plugin will be directly integrated into the jQuery Core library starting with version 1.5.

Documentation and Tutorials

To help you immediately use these plugins, we’re providing API documentation and tutorials that will help you ramp up on these new technologies.

API Documentation

Tutorials

Available for Download

Source code for the new plugins can be found on Github and we encourage the community to evaluate & enhance the functionality. The new plugins are available immediate download and the code can be found here:

jQuery Templateshttp://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl
jQuery Datalinkhttp://github.com/jquery/jquery-datalink
jQuery Globalizationhttp://github.com/jquery/jquery-global

New Contribution Vehicle

We’d like to thank Microsoft for their commitment to helping the jQuery Project and providing new and exciting functionality for the jQuery libraries. This has been a rewarding experience for both teams, laying the foundation for future collaboration and creating a new path for meeting the needs of the jQuery community.

Please be sure to read Microsoft’s joint announcement outlining the history of the effort and the importance of these contributions to Microsoft and the jQuery community:

jQuery Templates, Data Link, and Globalization Accepted as Official jQuery Plugins – Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President in the Microsoft Developer Division

jQuery Templates is now an Official jQuery Plugin – Boris Moore, Microsoft

jQuery Templating in the wild – James Senior, Microsoft

Web Camps TV #5 – Microsoft Commits Code to jQuery!
– Channel 9 Video

Seattle jQuery Open Space and Hack Attack with John Resig – July 5th

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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’s Proposal for Data Linking in jQuery. Feedback Requested.

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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.

Microsoft to Expand its Collaboration with the jQuery Community

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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:

  • Templating
  • Script Loading
  • Data Binding

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.

jQuery Conference 2010: San Francisco Bay Area Announced

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Microsoft Silicon Valley Research CenterThe 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:

  • jQuery
  • jQuery UI
  • jQuery Plugins
  • Complex Application Development
  • jQuery Case Studies

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:

  • Introduction to jQuery
  • Finding Something
  • Doing Something With It
  • Chaining
  • Introduction to jQuery UI
  • Implementing jQuery UI Widgets

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 Released

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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.

Downloading

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:

New Features

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");
});

What’s Changed?

There has been some large code rewrites within this release, both for performance and for fixing long-standing issues.

Performance Improvements

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.

jQuery Taskspeed Results (Feb 14, 2010)

Specifically we’ve improved the performance of 4 areas within jQuery:

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.

Event Rewrite

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:

  • It’s now possible to bind identical handlers with different data, namespaces, and event types universally.
  • Execution of event handlers will continue after one handler removes itself (or its sibling handlers).
  • We no longer attach data/namespace information directly to the event handlers (only a unique tracking ID).
  • We no longer use proxy functions, internally, to try and encapsulate handlers.
  • Execution order of events is now guaranteed in all browsers. Google Chrome had a long-standing error in their object-looping logic that has been routed around.

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.

Bug Fixes

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

14 Days of jQuery Summary: Days 1 – 7

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In case you’re not following along with the 14 days of jQuery, here’s a summary of what has been released thus far.

Pre Release Day 1

  • New jQuery API Site

Pre Release Day 2

  • jQuery 1.4rc1

Day 1

  • jQuery 1.4 Released
  • jQuery 1.4 Live Q&A

Day 2

  • HD version of jQuery 1.4 Q&A
  • Media Temple Giveaway
  • jQuery Podcast episode 7 with John Resig

Day 3

  • Internal Changes in jQuery 1.4, with John Resig

Day 4

  • Getting Involved in the jQuery Community, with Karl Swedberg

Day 5

  • appendTo Training Drawing
  • jQuery 1.4 Hawtness #1, with Paul Irish

Day 6

  • jQuery In The Enterprise

Day 7

  • New jQuery Forum
  • jQuery 1.4 Hawtness #2, with Paul Irish

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 EnlightenmentjQuery 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!