Announcements

jQuery maintainers continue modernization initiative with deprecation of jQuery Mobile

Posted on by

By: Michał Gołębiowski-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.

Announcements

jQuery maintainers update and transition jQuery UI as part of overall modernization efforts

Posted on by

By: Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek, Felix Nagel, and the jQuery team

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

The jQuery project is actively maintained and widely implemented — it’s used by 73% of 10 million most popular websites. As part of its ongoing effort to modernize the project, jQuery maintainers have taken steps to wind down one of its projects under the jQuery umbrella through a careful transition. 

Today, jQuery UI announced version 1.13 — its first release in 5 years and the project’s final planned release. Perhaps the most important update is that jQuery UI 1.13 now runs on the latest version of jQuery Core, providing a number of browser compatibility and security updates that have been missing from previous releases, in addition to community fixes and improvements. The jQuery UI Download Builder has also been restored and updated so developers can continue to download UI along with their favorite themes. The release is part of an ongoing series of updates across all jQuery projects.

jQuery UI is in maintenance-only mode. Users should not expect any new releases, though patches may be issued to resolve critical security, interoperability, or regression bugs. Trac, the project’s bug-tracking tool, has been put in read-only mode and developers are asked to file any critical issues on the project’s GitHub repository. 

jQuery UI was first launched in September 2007 as a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery library. It quickly gained popularity because it was one of the best tested and most accessible UI frameworks of its time. The tool helped developers build UI components such as form controls and date pickers using the best practices back then. In its heyday, jQuery UI was adopted by a broad set of enterprises including Pinterest, PayPal, IMDB, Huffington Post, and Netflix. 

Today, jQuery UI continues to be an important testbed for jQuery Core updates, helping the maintainer team spot bugs and interoperability issues that arise as the web platform evolves. 

Celebrating jQuery UI’s History

With the launch of jQuery in 2006, web developers were able to access and manipulate DOM and CSS faster and easier than ever before. Thousands of open source jQuery widgets and plugins were created to handle previously tricky problems, like showing and hiding elements, rotating through image carousels, or picking dates on a calendar. The jQuery ecosystem became a playground full of tools for making new and interesting interactions possible on the web. 

‘New and interesting’ doesn’t always translate to ‘good and useful’ — though there were many good plugins available, it was not always easy to tell which would be the most performant or provide the best user experience. Developers might have to go searching for the right tools or worse, spend significant time swapping through several plugins to figure out which one worked best. Further, there were few examples of best practices in user experience on the web, so visitors to one website could have vastly different (and thus confusing) interactions when they performed a similar task on another website. 

Members of the jQuery Core team wanted to help developers write performant, high-quality, and reusable jQuery components for their sites and applications. After some discussion, the idea for a second library with strict standards for coding, documentation, and theming was born. The project’s vision and goals included: developing a collaborative design process; providing flexible styling and themes; creating elegant visual and interaction design; providing a robust API; and prioritizing progressive enhancement, accessibility, internationalization and localization support.

In September 2007, jQuery UI officially launched as a set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of jQuery. Soon after, the team shifted their focus to provide a full set of APIs and methods to allow developers to create flexible, full-featured widgets that met high standards of quality. CSS effects such as easing and animation were added in and helped developers create more modern, enhanced experiences. The team at Filament Group later added a ThemeRoller, allowing developers to get started quickly by providing customizable theme boilerplate. ThemeRoller is still operational today.  

By the end of 2008, jQuery UI had an exploding community of users, developers, and interaction designers regularly providing updates and improvements to the project as best practices and style preferences evolved. Between 2009 and 2016, the community provided a variety of new official and unofficial themes and plugins, interoperability and other bug fixes, robust testing processes, and support for multiple versions of jQuery. 

jQuery UI’s prior official release came in September 2016, nearly a decade after it started. In that timeframe, the jQuery community had helped inspire dozens of other open source projects, pattern and component libraries. But newer CSS frameworks and approaches were taking hold, and slowly the community moved on to other projects. The UI team and jQuery Mobile teams merged, and the group focused more on maintenance and compatibility with jQuery Core.  

jQuery UI became an OpenJS Foundation Emeritus project in 2018, recognizing that it was winding down while noting the significance it had for the JavaScript ecosystem.

Celebrating jQuery UI Maintainers and Contributors

The scope of the project and the inclusiveness of the community was responsible for helping countless web makers develop a love and appreciation for user experience, localization, internationalization, accessibility, and clean, reusable code. Though many hours of work and contribution went into making jQuery UI a successful library, the jQuery UI core team deserves extra recognition for more than a decade of hard work shepherding the work and the community throughout the project’s lifecycle. Alex Schmitz, Jörn Zaefferer, Felix Nagel, Mike Sherov, Rafael Xavier de Souza, and Scott González led a team of many core contributors and more than 300 additional authors.

Additional gratitude is owed to Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek for preparing the 1.13 release and stewarding the repository for the past year. 

OpenJS Foundation will forever be grateful for the work of these open source developers and the impact they had on the ecosystem through their work. Please join us in celebrating these developers and jQuery UI!

Announcements | News | Updates

The Future of jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile

Posted on by

Reposted from blog.jqueryui.com/2017/12/the-future-of-jquery-ui-and-jquery-mobile/

The last few years have been difficult for the jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects. The projects have suffered from lack of resources and funding and loss of contributors due to a variety of factors. These combined factors have nearly stopped development on both projects. To remedy this situation we have decided to make some changes in the projects’ teams in addition to how they work.

Scott Gonzalez has lead the jQuery UI project for many years now and has helped to improve the quality tremendously. He has decided to step down from leading the project though he will still be helping in various ways. In an attempt to best utilize resources we have decided to combine the 2 teams into a single team under the leadership of Alex Schmitz, a long time jQuery UI contributor as well as the lead for jQuery Mobile. What this means is that the combined contributors will be able to serve the projects better, since both projects are very tightly coupled as jQuery Mobile depends upon jQuery UI. This does not mean that the two projects will become a single project. Both projects will continue to exist in their own repositories. However, we do hope to continue reducing the amount of duplicated code and widgets in the projects moving anything common to jQuery UI. Eventually, making jQuery Mobile more of an app framework with all the widgets living in jQuery UI.

In the past, when someone wanted to join the jQuery UI or jQuery Mobile teams we expected them to contribute to the library as a whole. We think going forward this needs to change; we will now be looking for and accepting people that are just interested in maintaining a single piece of the library, requiring a much smaller time contribution. So, if someone is just interested in working on sortable they could just lead the sortable widget without having to contribute to any other parts of the two libraries. This will not only allow for more focused and less time consuming contribution but also allow better specialization within our team.

In the past we have done all communication through IRC. Over time however, we have seen a large decrease in the number of people on IRC while other projects have had great results with easier to use tools like Slack. As a result, we will be switching to Slack for daily communication and meetings. We hope that this will ease contributions and interactions with potential new team members. Anyone can join the new Slack channel by navigating to http://bit.ly/2Btf6pu (Update: jQuery Chat).

In conclusion, we are currently very interested in attracting new team members to the combined jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile team. Anyone who is interested can feel free to reach out to Alex Schmitz, the new team lead for both projects, join our slack channel or even find us on IRC (we are still there). jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile rely on contributions from the community and can only continue to exist with your help!

Announcements | News | Updates

JQuery Mobile 1.5.0-alpha.1 Released

Posted on by

The first alpha release for jQuery Mobile 1.5 is out with numerous bug fixes, an updated base theme, overhauled auto initialization, new methods,  and new widgets!

The big changes:

  • New widgets: we have adopted the new controlgroup, checkboxradio, and button widgets from jQuery UI and have incorporated the accordion widget to replace the collapsible and collapsible set widgets which have been deprecated.
  • Rewritten widgets: The navbar and table widgets have been re-written with new features, performance improvements, and modularization improvements.
  • New auto enhancement module: The auto init for jquery mobile has been extracted into its own general purpose module with speed improvements that can make it faster then calling individually. On
  • Improved modularization: All code is now fully modularized to be able to include just the code you need.
  • Backcompat module: We now include all backcompat code as separate modules so it can be excluded and include a method to turn off all backcompat code for testing and upgrade.
  • New method: The .labels() method finds all label elements associated with the first selected element, mimicking the native labels property and has been incorporated from jQuery UI.
  • npm support: The jquery-mobile package on npm is now owned and maintained by the jQuery Mobile team.
  • Added jQuery 3.x support: We officially added support for jQuery 3.x.
  • Reduced old IE support: jQuery Mobile 1.5 officially drops support for IE 10 and below and Android 4.0 and below
  • Bug fixes: We have closed and fixed hundreds of bugs getting to our lowest bug count since the initial release of jQuery Mobile!

For the first time, we have our full changelog, download builder, and API documentation ready during the pre-release phase.

Download

Git

Comments

Note: please do NOT use the comments section of this blog post for reporting bugs. Bug reports should be filed in the jQuery Mobile Bug Tracker and support questions should be posted on the jQuery Forum.

If you have feedback on us doing our first beta release for jQuery Mobile 1.5, feel free to leave a comment below. Thank you.

Announcements | News | Updates

A long overdue status update

Posted on by

It has been a long time since the release of jQuery Mobile 1.4, and we have started to get a lot of questions about the status and future of the project. First and foremost, I would like to say that we are very much still alive and working. Looking at the master branch, it may seem like there hasn’t been much happening. That is because we moved our development to a jQuery Mobile 1.5 branch while we worked on some very big breaking changes. This work ended up taking a lot longer than expected which has delayed the release of 1.5-beta more than we would have liked.

With the beta release of jQuery UI 1.12, we are almost ready to release and have just three more widgets to finish work on (see the open Pull Requests for panel, table, and selectmenu). Here is a quick status update of what we have been doing and have coming up in future versions.

We have combined efforts with the jQuery UI team to stop duplicating widgets. We now share the rock solid and newly re-written jQuery UI core. Components from jQuery UI we now incorporate include:

  • Core (now broken up into individual micro modules)
  • Button
  • Checkboxradio
  • Controlgroup
  • Accordion
  • Tabs
  • Widget factory

We have made sure all of our widgets now support the core jQuery UI Widget factory methods and options. Included in the new features is a classes option, which allows complete control over the look of your widgets, which will open up whole new custom theming possibilities. Our work with jQuery UI will continue in future versions. In upcoming versions we will be working to incorporate the remainder of jQuery UI features and widgets (including the ever popular datepicker) into jQuery Mobile. A big step forward for jQuery Mobile will also be the incorporation of the interactions like draggable, droppable, and sortable from jQuery UI.

We have also not forgotten the widgets which are specific to jQuery Mobile. We have completely re-written the navbar and table widgets for 1.5. Continuing the work on auto-enhancement we began in 1.4, the auto-enhancement based on data-role has been completely rethought from the ground up. It is now a stand-alone module that can work with widgets as well as any function or jQuery method. It is now highly optimized for speed and page reload. In complex pages with lots of enhancement, the auto-enhancements are faster than individual selectors and function calls.

The team has been working hard behind the scenes improving our code quality, testing, and infrastructure. In 1.5 we have cleaned up a lot of our current testing infrastructure and now also share testing infrastructure we developed with jQuery UI. We have also unified our use of AMD and are finishing up sharing a download builder. In the future, we plan to also share a theme and theme roller with jQuery UI. Our plan for theme roller is to both use CSS Chassis and the theme roller they intend to build, separating the theming from the JavaScript libraries.

We have also been looking into how to provide the best possible touch screen support. To this end we have made two major decisions moving forward:

  • Looking forward, we are also working to join efforts with PEP (Pointer Events Polyfill) and Hammer.js to improve our gesture support. Hammer.js is a very popular and robust gestures library that will help to improve jQuery Mobile while lowering maintenance costs for the team.
  • We will also be removing our vmouse abstraction in favor of PEP, a pointer events polyfill.

Lastly, we would like to address browser support. We have always attempted to support as many browsers as possible, but in order to move forward in the rapidly changing landscape we will be dropping support for many older browsers. Going forward we will support:

  • IE 11+
  • Chrome Current -1
  • Firefox Current -1
  • Safari 8+
  • iOS 8+
  • Android 4+
  • Windows Phone 8.1+

We have not removed any workarounds or bug fixes in 1.5, but we will no longer be accepting bug reports against other browsers and will remove workarounds in 1.6.

There are many more changes coming both in 1.5 and future versions, but this gives you an idea of the things that we have been working on and what is coming in the future.

Announcements

jQuery Mobile 1.4.5 Released

Posted on by

We released the 5th maintenance release for jQuery Mobile 1.4 today to fix a few last creepy crawly bugs that cropped up from iOS8. See the 1.4.5 changelog for a list of all changes that landed in this fifth maintenance release for jQuery Mobile 1.4.

Checkout the 1.4.5 demos!

Download

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:

CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.5/jquery.mobile-1.4.5.min.css">
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.5/jquery.mobile-1.4.5.min.js"></script>

ZIP File:

If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files.

Download Builder:

Git

Supported jQuery versions

jQuery Mobile 1.4 supports jQuery core 1.8 and newer.

Graded Browser Support

See the jQuery Mobile 1.4 Supported Platforms page for the Graded Browser Support of this version.

Changelog

All changes are listed in the 1.4.5 changelog. If you are upgrading from jQuery Mobile 1.3 you can use the 1.4 upgrade guide.

 

Comments

Please do not use the comments section of this blog post to report bugs or ask for support. See our Contributing Guidelines for instructions about reporting issues. Use the forum for support questions. Thank you!

Announcements

jQuery Mobile 1.4.4 Released

Posted on by

We released jQuery Mobile 1.4.4 today at the jQuery Conference in Chicago! See the 1.4.4 changelog for a list of all changes that landed in this fourth maintenance release for jQuery Mobile 1.4.

Checkout the 1.4.4 demos!

Download

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:

CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.4/jquery.mobile-1.4.4.min.css">
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.4/jquery.mobile-1.4.4.min.js"></script>

ZIP File:

If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files.

Download Builder:

Git

Supported jQuery versions

jQuery Mobile 1.4 supports jQuery core 1.8 and newer.

Graded Browser Support

See the jQuery Mobile 1.4 Supported Platforms page for the Graded Browser Support of this version.

Changelog

All changes are listed in the 1.4.4 changelog. If you are upgrading from jQuery Mobile 1.3 you can use the 1.4 upgrade guide.

 

Comments

Please do not use the comments section of this blog post to report bugs or ask for support. See our Contributing Guidelines for instructions about reporting issues. Use the forum for support questions. Thank you!

News

New Project Lead

Posted on by

Today, we’re excited to announce that Alexander Schmitz is stepping up as the new jQuery Mobile Project lead. Alex, a regular speaker at the jQuery Conferences, joined the team in 2012 to become the Development lead a few months later. Alex’s involvement in jQuery UI, together with his experience as Development Lead for jQuery Mobile, make him the perfect candidate for the role, especially as we move into a new phase in the project, where we are merging Mobile and UI widgets and developing a common CSS Framework.

Former Project Lead Jasper de Groot will stay on the team together with the other team members Anne-Gaelle Colom, Gabriel Schulhof, and Ghislain Seguin. Having a great team is essential for an open source project, but the same goes for having an active community. We would like to thank all people who contributed to the project over the last four years. If you are also interested in contributing to the jQuery Mobile project, checkout the “About” page on the web site to see how you can get involved.

Announcements

jQuery Mobile 1.4.3 Released

Posted on by

Today we released jQuery Mobile 1.4.3. This third maintenance release for 1.4 does not only contain bug fixes, but also a new pagecontainer events demo. See the 1.4.3 changelog for a list of all changes.

Checkout the 1.4.3 demos!

Download

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:

CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.3/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.css">
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.3/jquery.mobile-1.4.3.min.js"></script>

ZIP File:

If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files.

Download Builder:

Git

Supported jQuery versions

jQuery Mobile 1.4 supports jQuery core 1.8 and newer.

Graded Browser Support

See the jQuery Mobile 1.4 Supported Platforms page for the Graded Browser Support of this version.

Changelog

All changes are listed in the 1.4.3 changelog. If you are upgrading from jQuery Mobile 1.3 you can use the 1.4 upgrade guide.

Comments

Please do not use the comments section of this blog post to report bugs or ask for support. See our Contributing Guidelines for instructions about reporting issues. Use the forum for support questions. Thank you!

Announcements

jQuery Mobile 1.4.2 Released

Posted on by

The second maintenance release for jQuery Mobile 1.4 is out! We fixed the issues with Android 2.3 and IE8 that were introduced in 1.4.1. More than 30 other bug fixes landed in this release, including ones for panel and transitions. See the 1.4.2 changelog for a list of all changes.

Download

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:

CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.2/jquery.mobile-1.4.2.min.css">
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.2/jquery.mobile-1.4.2.min.js"></script>

ZIP File:

If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files.

Download Builder:

Git

Supported jQuery versions

jQuery Mobile 1.4 supports jQuery core 1.8 and newer

Graded Browser Support

See the jQuery Mobile 1.4 Supported Platforms page for the Graded Browser Support of this version.

Changelog

All changes are listed in the 1.4.2 changelog. If you are upgrading from jQuery Mobile 1.3 you can use the 1.4 upgrade guide.

Comments

Please do not use the comments section of this blog post to report bugs or ask for support. See our Contributing Guidelines for instructions about reporting issues. Use the forum for support questions. Thank you!