In today’s post we’ll be presenting updates on both jQuery Core and UI as well as highlighting any upcoming training events being held and articles or videos which we think might be useful to read. We would appreciate your comments and feedback on them!

Contents

• –jQuery 1.5 Was Released
• –Unleashing the Grid – A New jQuery UI Grid
• –jQuery Conference Videos Are Now Available Online
• –Upcoming jQuery Training Events
• –A New Episode Of YayQuery

jQuery 1.5 Was Released

This week, the core team released jQuery 1.5 to celebrate the fifth birthday of the library. This included many performance improvements and bug fixes as well as a major re-write of the Ajax module which now comes with deferred callback management. Core also introduced a new feature called jQuery.sub which allows for new copies of jQuery to be created where properties and methods can be safely modified without affecting the global jQuery object.

If you haven’t had a chance to read or play around with these new features as yet, community member Eric Hynds wrote an in-depth tutorial on using Deferreds which you may be interested in. I also recorded a quick screencast explaining how to use jQuery.sub.

jQuery 1.5 has already begun to be used in the wild and you may also be interested in taking a look at jQuery templating author Boris Moore’s new script loader which also makes use of deferreds.

As always, we appreciate any and all community feedback on the 1.5 release and if you discover bugs or issues which you would like to report, you can do so by following our bug submission guidelines. We’ve already made a number of fixes to 1.5 (which can be tested in jQuery-Git) and we also welcome any feedback on that version as well.

Remember that up-to-date information on all our future releases (including jQuery 1.5.1) can be found on our roadmap.

Unleashing the Grid – A New jQuery UI Grid

The jQuery UI Team have announced an exciting new project called the jQuery UI Grid, where they’ll be building a feature rich, fast grid widget for enhancing table data with linking, sorting, paging and inline editing amongst other features.

There have been quite a few attempts outside of the project to create such widgets before, however they’ve often suffered from poor support, documentation or a lack of extensibility – the new UI grid project aims to solve these issues by providing a project-supported component that will be both modular and continually updated.

Speaking to Richard D. Worth, here’s a progress update on where the team are with the Grid at the moment:

We are nearing completion of development on Stage 1 of the project, which encompasses the creation of a generic data model, data type parsing, and markup. This stage will culminate in a “zero feature grid,” an enhanced HTML table that supports the jQuery UI CSS Framework and serves as a base for other grid features.

Read Richard’s full blog post on the new Grid.

jQuery Conference Videos Are Now Available Online

If you weren’t able to attend the jQuery Conference in Boston last year (with speakers such as John Resig and Karl Swedberg in attendance) we’ve got some great news – almost all of the talks are now available to watch online (either on your desktop or mobile device) via our conference site. You can also pick-up the slides mentioned in the videos by clicking on any individual speaker’s talk.

Upcoming jQuery Training Events

Group training can be an excellent way to improve your jQuery skills and Ben Alman over at Bocoup (a jQuery sponsor) would like to make a special announcement about upcoming events they’ll be holding in March and July.

Bocoup currently has two 3-Day Comprehensive jQuery Training sessions scheduled. As always, sessions will be held at The Bocoup Loft in Boston, and 10% of profits will go directly to the jQuery Foundation. Be sure to sign up now, since class sizes are limited to twelve people. Read more about our curriculum and trainers here:

March 2nd – 4th, 2011 and July 13th – 15th, 2011

jQuery Team member Karl Swedberg will also be holding a hands-on training event between March 1st-3rd in Holland, Michigan.

Karl will painlessly walk you through jQuery’s principles and show you how to make use of the library in your everyday coding. Karl will also be giving away free copies of his Learning jQuery book to all attendees.

For more information or to register, check out the IdeaFoundry site.

A New Episode Of YayQuery

For fans of the YayQuery podcast, Paul Irish (jQuery core team), Adam Sontag (jQuery UI team) and community members Alex Sexton and Rebecca Murphey are back with a new episode of their video podcast. In their latest episode, they discuss the new Deferreds features with one of the main developers behind the Ajax re-write (Julian Aubourg) and also look at other new developments in the world of jQuery and JavaScript.

Watch or listen to the podcast at YayQuery.com.

And that’s it!. If you have any interesting jQuery articles or posts which you think would be beneficial for the community to read, please feel free to mention them in the comments. We’ll be back with another Community Update in a few weeks with more news on the next version of jQuery.

Until then, good luck with all your projects!.

Welcome to the December jQuery Community Update. We hope you had an enjoyable break with your families and would like to wish everyone in the community a happy new year!

In today’s post we’ll be presenting updates on both jQuery Core and jQuery UI. We would appreciate your comments and feedback on them!

The Road to jQuery 1.5

The jQuery team has been hard at work this month preparing for a jQuery 1.5 release. Some of updates in this release represent our continued commitment to stability and consistency through bug fixes and browser behavior normalization, while others are important rewrites that will improve the performance, maintainbility, and versatility of the library.

What’s changed?

You can find a complete list of the changes we’ve made under the section of this post titled ‘Change Log’. The largest update currently available is our new overhauled $.ajax component, which is explained below by its author, Julian Aubourg:

The first change you’ll see in the ajax component is probably the new signature: jQuery.ajax( [ url ] , [ options ]). This allows us to fetch a URL with default options more easily. Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg since the entire thing has been rewritten from the ground-up to provide many new features.

Every request type now supports timeout and abort. Native XHR objects are now hidden from the developer and a new, jQuery-specific object with the same basic interface is provided as a replacement. This “jXHR” object provides the usual properties and methods to set & get headers, abort requests, and view readyState, responseXML, and responseText—but unlike a native XHR object, it also acts as a Promise. Promises allow you to add success, error or complete callbacks even after a request has completed; for instance, it is now possible to write things like jQuery.getJSON( url ).error( errorCallback ), and it will always work, regardless of the state of the original request.

Internally, the new ajax component features a pluggable architecture that makes it easy to define new custom dataTypes and transports. Custom dataTypes allow you to provide a consistent response object to your application code no matter the original data format, and custom transports allow you to do things like fake ajax requests for testing, use browser-specific network objects (like XDomainRequest), or use entirely different mechanisms for performing remote calls (like iframe or postMessage) without needing to write walls of code. Best of all, any such addition has access to the full power of jQuery.ajax right off the bat (parameter serialization, timeout, deferred callbacks, etc), and is exposed to application code using the same familiar $.ajax API that you already know.

Finally, some flexibility has been added to existing ajax options, and new ones have been added. For instance:

• You can provide an array of callbacks for success, error or complete. Non-functions are filtered and arrays are flattened, so you can easily add a complete handler before all the others simply by doing options.complete = [ yourCompleteCallback , options.complete ]!
• The new “headers” option makes it possible to set a map of request headers, avoiding the hassle of requiring a beforeSend callback just to set headers.

Great care has been taken to ensure existing unit tests passed, and numerous other tests have been added to help ensure everything functions as expected and doesn’t break existing code.

How can I help?

As always, we would like to invite the community to contribute new patches or help us test changes so that we can identify and correct any issues as soon as possible.

To perform testing, just try dropping the development version of jQuery (jQuery-GIT) into a copy of your existing application. If you hit an exception or some weirdness occurs, log in to the bug tracker and file a bug. Be sure to set the version drop-down to “git”. You can also test code on jsFiddle by selecting “jQuery 0 GIT” from the drop-down menu in the sidebar.

To contribute patches, Rick Waldron has written an excellent guide to jQuery bug fixing that walks through getting started with git, building and testing jQuery, and finding new bugs to work on. If you plan on submitting patches, you should also join the #jquery-dev channel on Freenode, which is where most discussions about jQuery development occur.

Current Change Log

• 1.Rewrite of the Ajax module by Julian Aubourg. This is the most significant change in this release and brings a number of performance, stability, and feature improvements to $.ajax. More information can be found above. #7195
• 2.jQuery now registers itself as a CommonJS async module. This allows jQuery to participate in browser module loading with compatible loaders such as RequireJS and Yabble. #7102
• 3.Removed the possibility of expando collisions when using noConflict() (V8 is fast!). The expando string now uses a random number + jQuery version to differentiate between instances of jQuery instead of millisecond clock time. #6842
• 4.Deduplicated code in $.get and $.post. #7847
• 5.When a native browser event is bubbling up the DOM, make sure that the correct isDefaultPrevented value is reflected by jQuery’s Event object. #7793
• 6.No longer cache non-html strings in buildFragment to avoid possible collision with the names of Object methods like toString. Testing shows this may also provide modest performance improvements. #6779
• 7.Updated cloneCopyEvent so that it does not create superfluous data objects when cloning elements. Exposes a new method, $.hasData, for determining whether or not an object has any data. #7165
• 8.Use a for loop rather than for/in loop when copying events so that code will work with an augmented Array.prototype. #7809, #7817
• 9.Fixed fadeIn not working properly with inline elements. #7397
• 10.Rewrote IE’s clone function to function properly in all known cases. #4386, #5566, #6997
• 11.Fixed IE breaking when dispatching a ‘submit’ event on plain JS objects. #6398
• 12.Fixed a regression in 1.4 that caused cache control to be set incorrectly for script transport. #7578
• 13.Improve performance of get() for negative indices. #5476
• 14.hasClass, removeClass didn’t work in IE if the attribute contained a carriage return (\r) character. #7673
• 15.Fix a regresion in 1.4.4 where calling $.fn.data without arguments breaks on non-DOM elements. #7524
• 16.Fix memory leaks in IE caused by the custom abort function of $.ajax. #6242
• 17.Prevent live events from firing on disabled elements in IE. #6911
• 18.Fixed a regression in 1.4.3 that caused sending a Location object to $.ajax to no longer work. #7531

jQuery UI 1.8.7 and Spinner, Menu, & Tooltip

The jQuery UI team have also been busily working away on new stuff. Here are some updates from them:

jQuery UI 1.8.7 was released since our last community update. This brought support for jQuery 1.4.4 but also provided noteable updates to Button, Progressbar and Datepicker. For the full details of this release, please read the jQuery UI 1.8.7 release notes.

Also, three new plugins just landed on the jQuery UI master branch, courtesy of Jörn Zaefferer: Spinner, Menu and Tooltip. These three widgets have been in development for some time and each has had their own milestone release. For more information on these new widgets you can read about them on their dedicated release pages above. We would like to invite the community to test and provide feedback on these new widgets and if you discover any bugs or issues that you need to report, instructions for doing so can be found at the jQuery UI Development Center.

jQuery Weekly Development Meetings

Beginning on January 4th 2011, we will be trialing the idea of a jQuery development meeting of core developers and contributors each week in the #jquery-meeting channel on freenode. Agendas for these meetings will be made available in advance and any members of the jQuery community that would like to attend are more than welcome to. Our first meeting will be held on Tuesday January 4th at 9PM EDT and the topics of discussion will be the jQuery 1.5 roadmap, ticket triage and a discussion on infrastructure. The complete agenda for this meeting can be found here.

Wijmo on the jQuery Podcast

For fans of the Official jQuery Podcast, we would like to remind you that Episode 40 is now available for streaming or download. In this episode, we talk to Chris Bannon of ComponentOne about the new jQuery UI-based library called Wijmo.

Donations

Has jQuery helped make your development life a little easier? As you may know, jQuery is an open-source project that relies on the time and effort of our valued volunteers and community members and is financed entirely through donations from the general public. If you’ve found jQuery useful, we would like to humbly ask that you consider making a small contribution (even $10 goes a long way). The jQuery project is a part of the Software Freedom Conservancy, so any donation you make is fully tax-deductible. For more information on financial contribution, please visit http://jquery.org/donate.

If you can’t donate any money, we’re always in need of talented software developers, IT professionals, and nerds of all stripes to help develop and maintain jQuery and its related properties. If you’re interested in contributing some time to help make jQuery great, please get in touch with a team member, or ask in the #jquery channel on Freenode.

That’s it for this update! Thanks for reading; we look forward to your feedback.

We’re happy to announce that jQuery 1.4.4 Release Candidate 2 is now available! This is the second release candidate of jQuery 1.4.4 – a follow-up maintenance release to 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:

• http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4rc2.js

How can I help?

To start, try dropping the above version of jQuery 1.4.4rc2 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 1.4.4rc2!

We’ll be closely monitoring the bug reports that come in and will work hard to fix any inconsistencies between jQuery 1.4.3 and jQuery 1.4.4.

What’s Been Updated?

There are a few areas in jQuery that have seen changes since 1.4.3 was released:

• (New) Added a new animation method, .fadeToggle()
• (Enh) Calling .data() with no arguments now includes data from HTML5 data- attributes (#7222)
• (Enh) Moved jQuery.props from support.js to attributes.js (#6897)
• (Enh) .width() and .height() now report the width and height of hidden elements (#7225)
• (Bug) stopImmediatePropagation was not being honoured in live/delegate event handlers (#7217)
• (Bug) Fixed an issue where host and protocol were not compared case-insensitively when determining whether an AJAX request was local or remote (#6908)
• (Bug) Fixed an issue where the “clone” variable was not being declared correctly (#7226)
• (Bug) Fixed a bug where we only change the ID on nodes that don’t already have an ID for rooted qSA (#7212)
• (Bug) Changing an HTML5 data attribute after calling .data(‘foo’) no longer causes .data(‘foo’) to also change (#7223)
• (Bug) Fixed a bug where Opera didn’t give height/width of display: none elements with getComputedStyle but did with currentStyle – fall back to that if it exists added.
• (Bug) Fixed a bug to ensure accessing computed CSS for elements returns ‘auto’ instead of ” consistently (#7337)

It also fixes a number of regressions in 1.4.3. One that caused:

• (Bug) JSONP calls to fail when cleaning up after a callback (#7196)
• (Bug) .removeData() to fail (#7209)
• (Bug) “ready” events to fire twice when added using .bind(“ready”, foo) (#7247)
• (Bug)  .css(‘width’) and .css(‘height’) to return 0 or negative values when trying to get the style of a hidden or disconnected element (#7225)
• (Bug) the attribute not equals selector ([foo!=bar]) to not work in Firefox (#7243)
• (Bug) find() to fail when selecting from forms containing inputs named “id” (#7212)
• (Bug) .children(selector) to fail on XML documents (#7219)
• (Bug) child (>), next sibling (+), and previous sibling (~) selectors to fail when combined with non-CSS pseudo-selectors like :last (#7220)
• (Bug) an error “handler is null” to be raised when passing null as the event handler (#7229)
• (Bug) it to be impossible to include a content-body with DELETE requests (#7285)
• (Bug) it to be impossible to include data with HEAD requests (#7285)
• (Bug) an issue where IE was firing click events on disabled elements when using live/delegate (#6911)
• (Bug) .show() to fail if .hide() was first called on an already-hidden element (#7331)
• (Bug) .show() to fail if an element was hidden in a stylesheet, then had .css(‘display’) manually set prior to calling .show() (#7315)
• (Bug) Sizzle.contains to throw an error on browsers that have no support for compareDocumentPosition or documentElement.contains (#7236)

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 1.4.4 release out in about a week. Thanks for your help in reviewing jQuery 1.4.4rc2!

We would also like to remind you that the sixth maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.8 is also now out. For more information on this release, feel free to head over to the jQuery UI blog for more information.

This is a big week for jQuery with our second release candidate for jQuery 1.4.3 already out and available for testing. We would like to thank everyone that’s been submitting their feedback and bug reports on it as they have been very helpful in making this release as stable as possible. Remember that if you’ve got a bug you would like to report, you can easily submit one through our bug tracker.

Our New Bug Tracker

Regarding the bug tracker, I would like to hand you over to Colin Snover who has an announcement to make about our bug tracking system:

Today we’ve introduced a new bug tracking system for jQuery core. In addition to being a lot faster and easier to use, the new Trac has a bunch of great new features that we hope you enjoy. We’ve tried hard to make sure that both end-users and developers are given a much better experience than what they were used to from the old service.

The most important change is the addition of voting, which will help the team prioritize which bugs and new features are of greatest concern to the members of the jQuery community. Up until now, there was no way to get such a concrete metric of which issues people felt were most important, so we’re very excited about this feature and hope you will use it to help us get an idea of what you want to see most in the library.

We added a login-free bug reporting mode, which will allow anyone to report a bug without needing to go through a registration process first. We also significantly improved the reporting process, so that when submitting a ticket, only a summary, description, version number, and issue type need to be provided.

Another great new feature of the new Trac is a more customisable notifications system, which allows anyone to pick and choose exactly when they receive emails about ticket changes. This feature also introduces the ability to “watch” tickets, so you can be kept up-to-date about tickets that you care about without needing to visit the bug tracker on a regular basis.

For jQuery developers, the new bug tracker offers a glut of improvements. Most visibly, we are now able to set up cross-references, so we know which issues block and are blocked by other tickets. We’ve also integrated support for GitHub, so changes to the jQuery GitHub repository are reflected automatically in Trac on the timeline and in the ticket system. Finally, changes have been made to the ticket workflow such that duplicate tickets can be addressed much more quickly, and tickets that are abandoned by their submitters are automatically closed to keep the number of invalid reports low.

We’re really excited about everything that has been added to the new bug tracker and we hope you will take a look today!

We encourage users to login when submitting a new bug report as this will allow you to see and use some of the new improved features such as the voting widget and notifications regarding follow-ups on your bug report. Let us know what you think about it!.

Community Support

One of the great things about our community is that we’re always ready and willing to give a hand to those just getting started out with jQuery.

In this spirit, we would like to invite members with experience using it to get involved with the jQuery Forums – this is a great place for assisting beginners with questions they may have about jQuery or just helping out members that are having some trouble getting their code to correctly function. To get started all you need to do is create a new forum account or alternatively sign in using your Google, Yahoo or Facebook account.

A Call For New jQuery And jQuery UI Tutorials

The jQuery & jQuery UI documentation sites are an excellent source of information on how to get started with jQuery, but we also like to provide the community with links to tutorials which might go into greater depth about particular topics.

If you enjoy writing about jQuery or jQuery UI, we would like to invite you to write an up-to-date tutorial on a particular aspect, function or component that we can then share with the rest of the community. The best tutorials may get added to our officially recommended tutorials page here.

Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to submit a tutorial for review.

jQuery Conferences

The Official jQuery Conference in Boston is going to be held on the 16th of this month and all jQuery team members attending are looking forward to seeing you there if you’re going. If you can’t make it however, don’t worry! No matter where you’re based, you can still register for the jQuery Online Summit running between November 16th-17th featuring speakers such as John Resig, Paul Irish, Rey Bango and many more.

Thanks and stay tuned for more updates from the jQuery team!