Good news everybody! The dates and venue for this year’s jQuery Conference have been determined.

The conference will be held September 12th and 13th at Microsoft Cambridge in Boston, MA.

This will be a 2 day conference with multiple tracks on each day. We’re in the process of planning out the schedule, talking with speakers, and setting up the conference web site.

Watch the jQuery blog or jQuery Twitter feed for notification when registration opens.

While this venue is larger than those that we’ve had in the past (Harvard Law School in ’07 and the MIT Stata Center in ’08) we do expect to sell out all the available seats, as has happened every year so far. That being said, the venue is quite incredible, easily one of the best spaces available for a conference:

A brief synopsis of some of the content that you’ll be able to expect:

The annual conference of jQuery users and developers. There will be talks on jQuery, jQuery UI, plugins, complex application development, and more – all from the top jQuery developers. Case studies from some of the leading users of jQuery will be included along with a 3 hour tutorial for those just getting started.

You can see the schedules from past jQuery conferences here: 2008, 2007. There will be a nominal fee (likely around $100-$150) to help us cover to cost of food for both days and shirts.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Boston this fall!

Note: If you are interested in sponsoring the conference, please contact John Resig.

Update: There have been a lot of questions asking if there will be a conference on the west coast (San Francisco) or in Europe. While we don’t have any immediate plans to hold conferences in those locations, this year, we would like to hold them in the future. In the meantime I recommend checking out Full Frontal (UK, November) and Fronteers (Amsterdam, November) – both of which should shape up to be excellent JavaScript conferences.

Update: Thanks to Jeff for adding the event to Upcoming.

jQuery UI 1.6rc6 is available.

Download jQuery UI 1.6rc6
You can download the entire development bundle directly at

http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery.ui-1.6rc6.zip

This includes a default theme, as well as all the test and demo files. Or you can create a customized download of individual components

http://jqueryui.com/download/

and a custom theme at

http://jqueryui.com/themeroller

This is the final step before releasing 1.6 final tomorrow (Saturday night). Since we only have two days, we really need you help us test if there are no major blockers left we might have overseen. Please create a ticket for any issue you find on the jQuery UI bug tracker:

http://dev.jqueryui.com/ (note: requires registration)

and send a note for discussion on the jQuery UI Development mailing list as well:

http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-ui-dev

Thanks everyone, prepare for a great weekend!

There are a few jQuery guys in San Francisco this week and we thought it’d be fun to have a meetup. John Resig (Creator of jQuery), Rey Bango (Head of jQuery Evangelism Team) and Yehuda Katz (Rails Core Contributor, jQuery Team Member) will all be meeting up tomorrow night (the 29th) if you want to say ‘hi’.

More information can be found on the Upcoming.org site for the event – feel free to add yourself if you’re interested in coming:
jQuery(“#drinks”).imbibe();

Welcome Digg users! You may be interested in the full jQuery 1.3 release, which just happened on the 14th. Enjoy!

This is a bug fix release for jQuery 1.3. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

There are no significant changes in 1.3.1 from 1.3 other than straight bug fixes. If you are still using jQuery 1.2.6, and looking to upgrade, please upgrade directly to this release.

Downloading

• jQuery Minified (18kb with Gzipping)
• jQuery Regular (114kb)

A copy of jQuery 1.3.1 is also available on Google’s CDN (feel free to copy the URL directly into your site):

• jQuery Minified
• jQuery Regular

If you wish to checkout the full release from the Subversion repository, you can do so by following the following instructions and checking out the source from the following location:

svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.3.1

A couple quick housekeeping notes:

Some noted in the release notes for 1.3 that we missed testing on Firefox 2, even though we still support it. This was a mistake on our part: We still support Firefox 2 and test on it prior to releases. You can see the full test suite run below.

It was also noted that Safari 2 didn’t show up in the list of browsers that we tested against prior to the 1.3 release. This is correct – we are phasing out support for Safari 2 in jQuery. Considering that Safari 2 shows no appreciable market share and has been superseded by 3 separate Safari releases (3.0, 3.1, and 3.2) we no longer see a need for significant testing against that release.

Finally, a few users noticed that we no longer provide a “packed” version of jQuery (a version of jQuery run through Dean Edwards’ Packer with Base62 encoding turned on). We did this for a couple reasons:

• Packed scripts are significantly harder to debug (even harder than minifed scripts).
• Packed scripts aren’t able to run on all platforms without issue (such as Adobe AIR and Caja-capable environments).
• But most importantly: Packed scripts are slower for the user than what you would get from using just minification. This may seem counter-intuitive since a packed script’s file size is smaller than a minified script but the final load time ends up being much higher (due to the decompression step it must go through). We have some data regarding the loading performance of minified scripts vs. packed scripts, for those that are interested.

The minifed copy of jQuery that we provide, run through the YUI Compressor, should be the optimal form of jQuery to use in a production environment (served using gzipping, if possible).

We’re getting ever-closer to the final release of jQuery 1.3! In a follow-up to the recent 1.3 Beta 1 we have another test version for everyone to try. As with before, it’s not ready for production use yet but we definitely need help in hunting down any bugs that we may have missed.

Please don’t test 1.3 Beta 1 anymore – all testing should move on to beta 2. The final release of jQuery 1.3 will be on the 14th of January with a final release candidate available a few days before.

Download

A copy of jQuery 1.3b2 can be found here:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.3b2.js

Please don’t use minified or packed versions of jQuery when testing – it makes locating bugs difficult.

Changes

So far two changes in 1.3 have been the most likely to cause problems:

1. Old, XPath, style attribute selectors: [@attr=value]. These have been deprecated for quite some time – and we’re finally removing them. To fix it just remove the @!
2. Bubbling triggered events. Triggered events now bubble up the DOM – some plugins haven’t expected this and have had to adapt. Its pretty easy to fix your code to “protect” against bubbling – add the following statement to your bound handler: if ( this === event.target ) { ... }

Tests

The test suite is holding up quite well. We currently have 1370 tests covering all aspects of the library and passing in all the major browsers:

How to provide feedback:

• Submit a bug to the jQuery bug tracker (you will need to create an account, first).
• Be sure to include a simple test case for any problem that you’re experiencing (either attach the test case or provide a link).
• Mention that you’re testing “jQuery 1.3 Beta 2” (otherwise your ticket will get confused with another release).
• Email a link to your test case and bug report to the jQuery Dev list so that the dev team will be notified about your issue.

Thanks to everyone, in advance, for all your help in testing this release. We’re really excited about this release and can’t wait to get it into your hands.

The jQuery team has been working hard on the new release of the jQuery library and it’s ready for some in-depth testing! jQuery 1.3 is not ready for production use yet but we need help to weed out any bugs that might’ve snuck through.

Download

A copy of jQuery 1.3b1 can be found here:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.3b1.js

Please don’t use minified or packed versions of jQuery when testing – it makes locating bugs difficult.

Major Areas of Change

Here are some of the areas that have seen major changes and are most likely to cause problems in your code:

• Selector Engine – The selector code has undergone a complete rewrite – it’s likely that some edge cases still exist here.
• DOM Manipulation (append/prepend/before/after) – This code has also undergone a large rewrite along with some of the logic for executing inline script elements.
• .offset() – Another method that has been completely rewritten.
• Event Namespaces – The logic for handling namespaced events has been completely rewritten.
• Event Triggering – When triggering an event the event now bubbles up the DOM – this is likely to cause some problems.

While we won’t get into the particulars of all the new features that are in jQuery 1.3 (we’ll do that later, when it’s ready for final release – scheduled for January 14th) we do appreciate any/all feedback that you can provide.

How to provide feedback:

• Submit a bug to the jQuery bug tracker (you will need to create an account, first).
• Be sure to include a simple test case for any problem that you’re experiencing (either attach the test case or provide a link).
• Mention that you’re testing “jQuery 1.3 Beta 1” (otherwise your ticket will get confused with another release).
• Email a link to your test case and bug report to the jQuery Dev list so that the dev team will be notified about your issue.

Thanks to everyone, in advance, for all your help in testing this release. We’re really excited about this release and can’t wait to get it into your hands.

Here at jQuery we’ve been using Amazon S3 to host the jQuery code and static site files for quite some time. It’s remained dependable and quite responsive.

Yesterday Amazon released their new service, called CloudFront. The major difference between it and S3 (they are both designed to serve files) is all about network performance. Whereas S3 was just about instantaneous control (being able to upload a file and see it live, instantly) – CloudFront tries to serve up a file as quickly as possible.

Yesterday we made the switch to using CloudFront for the jQuery site. The two domains that are affected are:

• code.jquery.com – Hosts the jQuery source code.
• static.jquery.com – Hosts all the jQuery site images, CSS, and JavaScript files.

Whereas S3 only had servers in Seattle, CloudFront has servers across the globe – allowing the site to load much-more-quickly no matter where you’re located.

Some initial numbers of come in and they’re quite promising.

Roland Moriz posted about the improvement in latency that he’s seen in Germany – with static.jquery.com coming in at 24ms latency in comparison to jquery.com’s 105ms latency.

I ran a similar test here in Boston and even managed to see a large improvement. I was seeing latency of anywhere from 50-200ms on Amazon S3, but only a latency of 17-19ms with CloudFront.

What does all of this mean? It means that the jQuery site is going to load even faster than it does now. We already receive some excellent hosting from Media Temple but being able to off-load these static files to the fast-loading servers will only make for a better browsing experience.

It also means that the jQuery project can expect to be paying even more in hosting costs. In less than 24 hours we’ve already had almost 2.5 million requests for over 50GB of data.

We pay all of these costs out of our own pocket – so a donation will significantly help us to make sure that we can keep providing a fast jQuery web site.

It should also be noted that CloudFront doesn’t appear to provide any sort of GZip compression on the transferred data. Because of this I still recommend that you use the Google Ajax Libraries API to load your copy of jQuery, done like so:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"></script>

If you’re unfamiliar with the Google Ajax Libraries API I highly recommend that you check in to it – we use it on jquery.com and it’s still the fastest way to serve up jQuery (Hosted by Google, Gzipped, and Minified).

Created by jQuery user Christopher Pickert (of BigFishGames.com), he writes:

"Since Halloween is the perfect time to celebrate the black arts of web development, I carved a special jQuery pumpkin last night. I hope you enjoy it.

Our QA person said that he found a bug in the code, but I explained that it was because of the candle."

He continues:

I did carve that – it’s not photoshop. On an impulse I bought a little $7 battery-operated pumpkin saw at the grocery store, and it’s great because you can do small details more easily. So actually the hard part was drawing the characters first and getting them the right size.

Great work Christopher!

We have two pieces of fantastic, albeit serendipitous, news today: Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with.

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functions to existing ASP.NET AJAX capabilities.

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time.

To start Nokia will be moving a number of their applications to work on the run-time (such as Maps) and building them using jQuery. jQuery will become part of their widget development platform, meaning that any developer will be able to use jQuery in the construction of widgets for Nokia phones.

Microsoft and Nokia aren’t looking to make any modifications to jQuery (both in the form of code or licensing) – they simply wish to promote its use as-is. They’ve recognized its position as the most popular JavaScript library and wish to see its growth and popularity continue to flourish.

In fact their developers will begin to help contribute back to the jQuery project by proposing patches, submitting test cases, and providing comprehensive testing against their runtimes. As with any contribution that comes in to the jQuery project it’ll be closely analyzed, reviewed, and accepted or rejected, based upon its merits, by the jQuery development team – no free ride will be given.

A significant level of testing will be added to the project in this respect. The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit – above-and-beyond what is already done by the jQuery team.

The whole jQuery team is quite excited by these prospects and wishes to take this opportunity to welcome both companies to the jQuery community. It’s phenomenal to see these two, major, corporations take the large step of using jQuery as a base for their, and their developers, future development. They will join a long list of happy jQuery users, including Google, Intel, IBM, Intuit, Reuters, and many others.

Update: Blogs posts by Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman, both at Microsoft, have posts on the subject matter from their perspective.

We’ve been listening to your feedback today, about the new jQuery site redesign and one thing has become clear:

Poor dude didn’t even last 24 hours. We wanted to have some fun with the home page, but this bordered on a little too “extreme” for most tastes.

We plan on bringing some further revisions to the homepage in the future, but in the meantime here’s a quick overhaul, put together by the always-excellent Scott Jehl, that’ll help tide everyone over:

As a token of our appreciation for sticking with the “JavaScript Rock Star” for a day we’ve included a little Easter Egg in the new site. It would be useful if you knew the Konami Code.

Naturally, the whole redesign still has many tweaks that’ll be made over the next couple weeks, especially to individual page fonts, font sizes, and colors.

I want to, once again, thank Scott Jehl for all the hard work that he’s been putting in to the site design – and the excellent Varick Rosete (of nGenWorks and Happy Webbies) for the great illustration that he drew for us.

Here’s to many happy days of rockin’ out with jQuery!