By: Michal Golebiowski-Owczarek, Felix Nagel, and the jQuery team

Editor’s Note: the following blog post was originally published to the OpenJS Foundation Blog.

jQuery maintainers are continuing to modernize its overall project that still is one of the most widely deployed JavaScript libraries today. The team announced that the cross-platform jQuery Mobile project under its umbrella will be fully deprecated as of October 7, 2021. New technologies for mobile app development have evolved since this project was launched in 2010, so we’re encouraging developers to plan for this jQuery Mobile transition.

Please note that:

• The Download Builder will remain available.
• Mobile 1.4 is not compatible with the new jQuery Core.
• Issues will be turned off. Please report critical security bugs via email to security@jquery.com. 

Celebrating jQuery Mobile’s History

jQuery Mobile was conceived and announced in 2010, three years after the launch of jQuery.  The project was exciting and ambitious. At announcement, jQuery Mobile promised compatibility across multiple platforms, browsers, and versions. Several mobile browser vendors, including Palm and Mozilla, signed on to sponsor the project: 

“The jQuery community has focused on making the Web as productive and fun as possible. When we heard the mission behind jQuery Mobile, we wanted to help. With webOS we have shown that the Web platform is fantastic for developers, so we are excited to help make jQuery Mobile as good as it can be.” -Dion Almaer – Palm

At the time, the mobile web was desperately in need of a framework capable of working across all browsers, allowing developers to build truly mobile web applications. jQuery had already changed the way developers were building on the web, making it easier (and faster) to create secure, compliant applications. 

With jQuery Mobile, the project’s goals were to bring the ease-of-use of jQuery to HTML-capable mobile device browsers and to make it easier for developers to build progressively enhanced web applications. Led by Todd Parker of Filament Group, a development studio known for their work on cross platform and accessibility-first applications, jQuery Mobile launched its alpha release in October 2010. 

Alpha features included several components, layouts and theming tools that simplified the process of building a mobile web application. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, which were hot (and tricky) topics in web development at the time, featured heavily: jQuery Mobile promised developers and users the best possible experience their platform could handle. Accessibility was another key feature, with Mobile promising a user experience that could be navigated by touch, keyboard, or screen reader via ARIA compatible components. Additional features such as simplicity, file size, and the ability to deploy jQuery Mobile applications through an app store drove further excitement. 

Over the next year, the jQuery Mobile team continued to add compatible platforms and browsers, new components and themes, and eventually a themeroller tool that allowed developers to configure and download themes without writing any CSS. 

The community response was overwhelming – by the time 1.0 was released in November 2011, jQuery Mobile had gathered over 125 contributors, dozens of articles, tutorials and demos, 8 published books, and a gallery of sites, plugins and extensions to welcome and introduce new developers to the project. 

jQuery Mobile continued to make monthly releases throughout 2012 and 2013, regularly adding and improving components, resolving compatibility issues with mobile browsers, and making performance improvements to speed up page rendering times. The development team also continued to prioritize and highlight the importance of responsive web design and accessibility principles with each new release. 

As the number of components and widgets swelled – both those that were officially supported or widely adopted in the community, performance and compatibility issues with mobile platforms, browsers, and jQuery core were also exacerbated. Though the project did have some automated tests, there were still a number of items that needed to be tested manually, which slowed down the development process. 

In mid 2013, Jasper de Groot became the project lead and announced tighter development collaboration between jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile teams, sharing goals, roadmaps and code in order to ease the workload for both groups. The team continued to provide maintenance releases and support, but progress continued to slow under the burden of testing and supporting such a large community. 

Alex Schmitz took over the lead in July 2014, but by that time the size of the project, combined with the pace and availability of new mobile browser features, made finding a viable path forward for the project increasingly difficult. 

The latest stable version was released October 2014. Alex and team made a big push to update jQuery Mobile again in 2017 with the release of an alpha version of 1.5; this version would see compatibility with jQuery 3.0 and npm support among other things.

jQuery Mobile became an OpenJS Foundation Emeritus project in 2018, signifying that the goals of the project had been achieved.

jQuery modernization initiative

The depreciation of jQuery mobile follows the careful transition of another project under the jQuery project umbrella, jQuery UI.

jQuery Core is still actively maintained and widely implemented. As part of its modernization initiative, the team also has been making a series of updates this year to its infrastructure, including migrating and improving its CDN.

Celebrating jQuery Mobile Maintainers and Contributors

The contributions to jQuery Mobile opened up opportunities for people and organizations around the world, and we are thankful for all the contributions over the years. We would like to give an extra shout out of gratitude to the past maintainers of jQuery Mobile: Alexander Schmitz, Jasper de Groot, and Todd Parker.

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.

As most of you are likely aware by now, a potentially dangerous security vulnerability was highlighted recently in the use of npm modules in your projects. In general, the jQuery Foundation still believes this is a safe and very powerful practice and in no way are we saying you should no longer use npm for package management in your JavaScript projects. What we would like to advocate is caution for our community of jQuery plugin developers and users of the many projects in the foundation who distribute packages on npm when installing a package and its dependencies.

A Quick Recap

Rather than rewrite the story, go ahead and check out the full recap and summary from npm on their blog.

The Concern

What happened next is the reason we are writing this post. Azer Koçulu published a number of packages on npm, one of which was the left-pad package which is a simple bit of code that is depended upon by many other packages. After the package was unpublished, many popular projects began having build failures due to the missing package. This is concerning in itself that anyone could unpublish a dependency you have, or a dependency of a dependency of a dependency and cause you or your team real headaches. Shortly after left-pad was unpublished, the npm team decided to un-unpublish it with a new owner to fix the many breaking builds around the internet. What is more concerning though, is the fact that once a package is unpublished, anyone can grab those package names you depend on somewhere in your dependency tree and push new, potentially malicious code into your project. In general, this wouldn’t be too bad because your package likely relies on a version that was unpublished and the new published version would not be pulled in. However, many people when installing dependencies use the commands npm i --save <package-name> or npm i --save-dev <package-name> which by default installs the latest version published at the time preceded by a ^ like ^1.0.0 which tells npm to install any updated version through minor releases the next time dependencies are updated. This means that if you reinstall or update your project and someone has pushed malicious code into a patch (1.0.1) or minor (1.1.0) release from our example, it will automatically be installed in your project.

Recommendations

Our primary recommendation is to be careful. Know what you are installing and know what your dependencies and their dependencies down the tree are installing. You should definitely go through your projects now and see if any of the modules you depend on have been unpublished as well as if any of them are on this list and have recently published new versions that you may want to avoid until you verify it is safe. Though we haven’t spoken with them directly, we are sure the folks at npm, inc. are working hard on a way to address these concerns but until then, be vigilant and keep your projects and plugins safe. We have believed for a while and continue to believe that JavaScript has been and will continue to be one of the strongest options for developing everything from your personal blog to enterprise class applications. With any technology, we will have hiccups along the way but as long as we learn from them and retain that knowledge as we continue on, JavaScript will prevail.

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.

The jQuery Foundation is excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Globalize project, our internationalization (i18n) library. This release has been a long time coming and as Globalize picks up steam and gains more and more adoption every day, we are proud to finally announce the first stable release of this project. We could go on about the features and benefits of this latest release but we felt it was important that you hear it from the source. Below, Rafael Xavier, the lead for the Globalize project, details everything you need to know about the 1.0 release of Globalize and what is yet to come.

An always up-to-date, modular and simple i18n library

Allow me to skip the details and jump to the fun part. Below is what you get with Globalize today, which provides number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and parsing, currency formatting, message formatting (ICU message format pattern with gender and pluralization support).

Date formatting and parsing

The date module provides methods that convert dates and times from their internal representations to textual form (formatting) and back again (parsing) in a language-independent manner. Your code can conveniently control the length of the formatted date, time, datetime.

locale	.dateFormatter({ datetime: "medium" })( new Date() );
en	"Feb 20, 2015, 12:15:00 PM"
zh	"2015年2月20日 下午12:15:00"
zh-u-nu-native	"二〇一五年二月二〇日 下午一二:一五:〇〇"
es	"20 de feb. de 2015 12:15:00"
ar	"٢٠‏/٠٢‏/٢٠١٥ ١٢،١٥،٠٠ م"

Your code can even select the fields individually, completely independent of the locale conventions. The pattern “GyMMMd” selects era in its abbreviated form, year, month in its abbreviated form, and day.

locale	.dateFormatter({ skeleton "GyMMMd" })( new Date() );
en	"Feb 20, 2015 AD"
zh	"公元2015年2月20日"
es	"20 feb. de 2015 d. C."
ar	"٢٠ فبراير، ٢٠١٥ م"

 

Relative time formatting

In addition to formatting dates and times, the relative time module provides internationalized messages for date and time fields, using customary word or phrase when available.

locale, value	.relativeTimeFormatter( "day" )( value );
en, -15	"15 days ago"
en, 0	"today"
en, 1	"tomorrow"

 

Number formatting and parsing

The number module provides methods that format and parse numbers. Your code can be completely independent of the locale conventions for decimal points, thousands-separators, or even the particular decimal digits used, or whether the number format is even decimal. Though, it can still conveniently control various aspects of the formatted number like the minimum and maximum fraction digits, integer padding, rounding method, display as percentage, and others.

locale	.numberFormatter()( Math.PI );
en (English)	"3.142"
es (Spanish)	"3,142"
ar (Arabic)	"٣٫١٤٢"

Formatting thousands-separators:

locale	.numberFormatter()( 1000000 );
en-US (English as spoken in the United States)	"1,000,000"
en-IN (English as spoken in India)	"10,00,000"

Formatting percentages:

locale	.numberFormatter({ style: "percent" })( 0.15 );
en (English)	"15%"
es (Spanish)	"15 %"
ar (Arabic)	"١٥٪"

 

Currency formatting

The currency module provides methods that allow to format a currency. Your code can be completely independent of the locale conventions for which currency symbol to use, whether or not there’s a space between the currency symbol and the value, the side where the currency symbol must be placed, or even decimal digits used by particular currencies. Currencies can be displayed using symbols (the default), accounting form, 3-letter code, or plural messages.

Formatting currencies using symbols:

3-letter currency code	en (English)	de (German)	zh (Chinese)	ar (Arabic)
.currencyFormatter( "USD" )( 1 );	"$1.00"	"1,00 $"	"US$ 1.00"	"US$ ١٫٠٠"
.currencyFormatter( "EUR" )( 1 );	"€1.00"	"1,00 €"	"€ 1.00"	"€ ١٫٠٠"
.currencyFormatter( "CNY" )( 1 );	"CN¥1.00"	"1,00 CN¥"	"￥ 1.00"	"ي.ص ١٫٠٠"
.currencyFormatter( "JPY" )( 1 );	"¥1"	"1 ¥"	"JP¥ 1"	"JP¥ ١"
.currencyFormatter( "GBP" )( 1 );	"£1.00"	"1,00 £"	"£ 1.00"	"£ ١٫٠٠"
.currencyFormatter( "BRL" )( 1 );	"R$1.00"	"1,00 R$"	"R$ 1.00"	"R$ ١٫٠٠"

Formatting currencies in their full names:

locale	.currencyFormatter( "USD", { style: "name" })( 1 );
en (English)	"1.00 US dollar"
de (German)	"1,00 US-Dollar"
zh (Chinese)	"1.00美元"
ar (Arabic)	"١٫٠٠ دولار أمريكي"

Formatting currencies in the accounting form, which, for example, in the English locale uses parens instead of the minus sign for negative numbers:

locale	.currencyFormatter( "USD", { style: "accounting" })( -1 );
en (English)	"($1.00)"

 

ICU message format support (with gender and pluralization support)

The message module provides methods that allow for the creation of internationalized messages, with optional arguments (variables/placeholders) allowing for simple replacement, gender and plural inflections. The arguments can occur in any order, which is necessary for translation into languages with different grammars.

Globalize.loadMessages({
  en: {
   likeIncludingMe: [
      "{count, plural,",
      "    one {You have one task remaining}",
      "  other {You have {count} tasks remaining}",
      "}"
    ]
  }
});

 

locale, count	.messageFormatter( "likeIncludingMe" )({ count: count });
en, 1	"You have one task remaining"
en, 99	"You have 99 tasks remaining"

 

Built on standards

Globalize is based on the Unicode Consortium standards and specifications (UTS#35) and it uses its Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. CLDR is constantly updated and is used by many large applications and operating systems, so you’ll always have access to the most accurate and up-to-date locale data.

CLDR content

Globalize needs CLDR content to function properly, although it doesn’t embed or host such content. Instead, Globalize empowers developers to load CLDR data the way they want. Vanilla CLDR in its official JSON format (no pre-processing) is expected to be provided. As a consequence, (a) Globalize avoids bugs caused by outdated i18n content. Developers can use up-to-date CLDR data directly from Unicode as soon as it’s released, without having to wait for any pipeline on our side. (b) Developers have full control over which locale coverage they want to provide on their applications. (c) Developers are able to share the same i18n dataset between Globalize and other libraries that leverage CLDR. There’s no need for duplicating data. For more information read our documentation on CLDR Usage.

Browser and Node.js Support

Globalize is systematically tested against desktop and mobile browsers and Node.js. So, using it you’ll get consistent results across the various browsers and between client and server. For more details read our Browser Support section.

Get Started

Install it and use it today. See examples for AMD + bower, or Node.js + npm, or plain JavaScript in our Usage section.

If you’re coming from Globalize 0.x, don’t panic. We’ve created a migration guide for you.

Team and Community

We’re grateful for all the support we have received, specifically from Jörn Zaefferer and Scott González for their help with the initial rewrite concept and for being constant advisors; John Emmons, Steven R. Loomis, and Mark Davis (Unicode) for their help with CLDR and UTS#35 specification questions; Alex Sexton and Eemeli Aro for their messageformat.js and make-plural.js libraries that power respectively our MessageFormat and Plural modules; and the jQuery Foundation for the community building, collaborative efforts and its continued support of Globalize and web internationalization.

We want to also thank Nebojša Ćirić, Mihai Niță, and Shanjian Li (Google); Steven Loomis, Steven Atkin, and John Emmons (IBM); Rick Waldron (Ecma-402 2nd Edition editor); Caridy Patiño and Eric Ferraiuolo (Yahoo); Christophe Jolif and Clement Mathieu (Dojo); Cameron Dutro and Kirill Lashuk (Twitter); Craig Cummings and Tex Texin (jsi18n.com); Santhosh Thottingal and Kartik Mistry (Wikipedia); Axel Hecht (Mozilla); Bruno Lewin and Daniel Goldschmidt (Microsoft); Lily Wen (Adobe); Edwin Hoogerbeets (LG); Eirik Rude (Oracle); Xiang Xu (Paypal); Iskren Chernev (moment.js); and Tingan Ho (l10ns.org) to have joined us in an effort to better coordinate the globalization (internationalization and localization) activity of the JavaScript community. If you want to get involved or read more about it, head over to the javascript-globalization@googlegroups.com mailing list or take a look at our JavaScript Globalization overview page.

Upcoming

We’re working on even more exciting features that will soon be part of Globalize. To name a few: runtime optimization and non-gregorian calendar support. So, if any of these are of your interest, make sure you chime in. Express your thoughts and your needs (e.g., which calendars you want to be supported).
We are always looking for contributors to join our team. If you want to get involved, please read the contributing guide. Your help is very welcome.

Today, we’re happy to announce the first release of PEP (jQuery Foundation’s Pointer Events polyfill) since Google transferred the Pointer Events polyfill to the jQuery Foundation. There’s more work to do in order to address changes to the Pointer Events specification and flesh out our test suite, but you can start using Pointer Events in your projects today! Other projects, like jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and Dojo are in the process of switching to Pointer Events with PEP.

To celebrate our first release, Alex Schmitz built a little demo which he used to show PEP working on different devices.

Since the transfer, we’ve been focusing on moving over to new infrastructure to allow easier contributions and faster development. We’ve switched the tests over to using Intern and set up continuous integration with Travis CI, using BrowserStack to run the tests in all of our supported browsers. We’ve also switched away from plain file concatenation to using ES6 modules via Esperanto to make the cross-file dependencies explicit. Lastly, we’ve moved to our common release infrastructure to ensure consistent releases.

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.

For many years now the jQuery team first, and then the jQuery Foundation as an organization, has helped developers all over the world to write simple, concise, and clean code that isn’t affected by all the browser incompatibilities that developers are well-accustomed to. As you know, all the jQuery Foundation projects are maintained by a group of volunteers who keep the libraries relevant and in line with modern browser APIs and issues. The team also keeps the API documentation and educational guides up to date.

In the next few months, the team will work on the several jQuery-related websites to ensure an even higher standard of quality to help millions of users write their code. There is so much to do and our resources are limited, so today we are asking you for help. Part of the team is currently focusing their attention on the Learning Center, but we appreciate help in any repository. If ever the jQuery Foundation projects have saved you work and frustration, this is the right time to give something back. There are many ways in which you can contribute, and you don’t have to be an expert developer. You can help the project by fixing issues in the code or improving the documentation. Everything counts. The jQuery Foundation welcomes contributions from anyone willing to put in the time and effort to help us and our community of users.

To learn more about how you can contribute, visit the Contribute website, sign our Contributor License Agreement and start helping. In case you can’t help us by addressing code or documentation problems but you still love our projects, you can help us by making a small donation.

We’ve just released Esprima 2.1.0! This release introduces support for several new pieces of ES6 syntax: Classes, Rest Parameters, Computed Property Names, let and const. See the release notes below for full details. We’ve also made various improvements to our testing infrastructure to make the codebase more contributor friendly. A big thank you to all those who contributed patches to this release: Ariya Hidayat, Bei Zhang, Brandon Mills, Mike Rennie, Mike Sherov.

While working on bringing more ES6 features to Esprima, we began collaborating with other JavaScript parsers and parser consumers to help define a community standard for JS AST generation. The result of that effort is the ESTree spec, located here: https://github.com/estree/estree. We wanted to say thank you to all who are contributing, which includes members from Esprima, the Mozilla SpiderMonkey parser, the Acorn parser, and Babel, to name a few. A full list of contributors is located here: https://github.com/estree/estree/blob/master/README.md

Expect a 2.2 release to follow in a few weeks bringing even more ES6 support. If you’d like to help contribute, we hang out in the #esprima room on Freenode IRC, and have a weekly meeting at 2PM ET on Wednesdays in #esprima-meeting on Freenode IRC as well. We look forward to seeing you there!

Release Notes

• Support ES6 class #1001
• Support ES6 rest parameter #1011
• Support ES6 computed property name #1037
• Support ES6 lexical declaration #1065
• Expand the location of property getter, setter, and methods #1029
• Enable TryStatement transition to a single handler #1031
• Tolerate unclosed block comment #1041

We’re excited to announce that the Pointer Events specification has become a W3C Recommendation! As we’ve said before, we love Pointer Events because they support all of the common input devices today – mouse, pen/stylus, and fingers – but they’re also designed in such a way that future devices can easily be added, and existing code will automatically support the new device. While reaching Recommendation status is a monumental moment, there’s still much work to do.

Pointer Events aren’t a viable solution until they’re usable in all of the browsers that developers are supporting. While that day may seem far away, the jQuery Foundation is dedicated to getting usable Pointer Events in every developer’s hands as soon as possible. We’re working on PEP, our Pointer Events polyfill that Google transferred from the Polymer project to the jQuery Foundation. PEP will be integrated into projects such as jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and Dojo. We’re hoping to get out our first release in the next few weeks. If you’re interested in helping out, let us know.

Microsoft is already shipping a full implementation of Pointer Events in IE11 and they had a mostly complete, prefixed implementation in IE10. Mozilla also has a full implementation for Firefox on Windows Metro, though it’s not currently enabled. Both implementation are passing 100% of the W3C Pointer Events test suite. You can follow Mozilla’s progress for all of their supported platforms on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko/Touch.

Of course, the world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. There’s still no sign that Apple will ever implement Pointer Events. Because of this, Google has decided not to ship Pointer Events in Blink, but rather to try to extend Touch Events to have the power of Pointer Events. The work to extend Touch Events is happening in the Touch Events Community Group to ensure interoperability and standardization. However, there is reasonable concern that adding several extensions to Touch Events will just result in an even more fragmented landscape, eventually worsening the situation rather than improving it. It’s not clear that Apple would implement all of these features anyway, and adding support for hover would require awkward APIs due to the logic that already exists in Touch Events. Even if the power of Pointer Events were added to Touch Events, the awkward event interface isn’t nearly as nice or easy to transition to from Mouse Events.

Despite Google’s current position, they’re willing to continually re-evaluate if shipping Pointer Events will help move the web forward. We’re hopeful that Google will reverse their decision in the future and Apple will eventually be compelled to implement Pointer Events once Safari is the only major browser without support. The Chromium issue for implementing Pointer Events is already in the the 99th percentile of all issues (open and closed) based on number of stars.

As a community, we can shape the future of the web right now. We need to stop letting Apple stifle the work of browser vendors and standards bodies. Too many times, we’ve seen browser vendors with the best intentions fall victim to Apple’s reluctance to work with standards bodies and WebKit’s dominance on mobile devices. We cannot let this continue to happen. The jQuery Foundation is dedicated to driving standards, like Pointer Events, to improve the developer experience and in turn, make the web a better, more accessible place for everyone. Together, we can push the web forward and let standards and better APIs win. We can choose Pointer Events over Touch Events. And we can do it right now, with PEP.