This is the first of several posts I will be making containing my notes from the jQuery Boston 2010 conference I attended this weekend. The entire conference kicked off with a presentation by the legendary John Resig, and he marked the occasion by announcing the release of both jQuery 1.4.3 (release announcement) and, more significantly, the alpha version of jQuery Mobile. My notes on his keynote presentation are after the jump.
Please note that I cannot vouch for the 100% accuracy of these notes… a lot of material was covered very quickly, and my notes were necessarily sketchy. I have done my best to record things accurately, but check at jQuery.org before you go shouting any momentous news to the world!
1.4.3 is a minor release, focused on bug fixes and performance improvements.
JSLint is a JavaScript code quality tool
The jQuery project is moving towards modularity: modules can be dynamically and independently loaded, as through a script loader
the $.fn.css() function underwent a “massive rewrite,” and has improved the speed of the selector engine as well as the extensibility of the function. There are now CSS Hooks to support new properties.
$.fn.find(), $.fn.filter(), $.fn.is() and $.fn.closest() functions have seen major performance gains due to a patch on the browser side. The story was great: Resig contact Mozilla with a patch request on Friday, and they added it to their bug tracker on Saturday. Webkit immediately noticed the patch, and added it on Sunday, just in time for the Mozilla patch to land on Monday. Talk about fast turnaround… the things people say about a unified dev community may be truer than we thought.
Several important plugins have been officially added, including jQuery Data Link, which will keep a form and a JS data object synchronized through a new ChangeData event.
More significantly, jQuery-tmpl provides an official templating system! More on this in notes from a later talk—this is big, and will be foundational for important future updates to jQuery UI, but I am still wrapping my head around how tmpl works…
jQuery Mobile was the single biggest announcement of the keynote. The framework allows mobile developers to write static HTML pages that will progressively pick up advanced, widgetized behavior on capable devices, while still displaying correctly on the most archaic of mobile browsers. It was described several times during the weekend as “the first JavaScript framework where you don’t write any JavaScript,” and I will post more on it later on.