Building on two years of collaboration with the jQuery Project, Microsoft announced today at MIX 2010 that it will be working with the jQuery Core Team and community to provide source code that will help to further advance the jQuery JavaScript Library. The planned contributions target specific functionalities in areas of mutual interest. They include:

• Templating
• Script Loading
• Data Binding

The initial focus will be on a new templating engine that will allow for easy and flexible data rendering via defined templates. Microsoft has submitted a proposal for public review along with an experimental plugin, and is actively collaborating with the jQuery team and community on a unified implementation. The templating engine will be reviewed and considered for inclusion into the jQuery JavaScript Library or maintained as an official jQuery plugin.

Microsoft will also ship a current release of the jQuery JavaScript Library in both Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC as well as continue to host current versions of the library on the Microsoft CDN.

Lastly, Microsoft will be providing resources to assist in QA testing of jQuery in new environments to ensure continued stability and longevity of the library.

We see these contributions as a tremendous benefit to the jQuery effort and community and look forward to continued collaboration with Microsoft.

The San Francisco Bay Area conference is the second of four events planned by the jQuery Project in 2010. The first was the jQuery14 event, and additional conferences are being planned in Europe and on the East Coast for later this year.

This venue is the largest that the project has worked with to date (Harvard Law School in ‘07, the MIT Stata Center in ‘08 and Microsoft New England Research Center in ‘09) and we expect to sell out very quickly.

Registration is currently scheduled to open on Wednesday, March 17th; tickets will be priced at $199. In addition to General Admission tickets, we’re offering a limited number of discounted student tickets priced at $99, with a valid student ID.

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

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

• jQuery
• jQuery UI
• jQuery Plugins
• Complex Application Development
• jQuery Case Studies

In addition to two days of jQuery sessions, for the first time we’ll be adding an additional day of jQuery training, prior to the main event. The training will be provided by appendTo and focused on helping you and your team get up to speed on jQuery prior to attending the conference. The training will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to jQuery
• Finding Something
• Doing Something With It
• Chaining
• Introduction to jQuery UI
• Implementing jQuery UI Widgets

The training will be held on April 23rd at the Microsoft San Francisco offices in downtown San Francisco; tickets will cost $299. All proceeds from training go to the jQuery Project.

Interested in speaking? Please fill out our call for speaking submissions form and watch the jQuery Blog for updates.

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Here are the show notes for this episode:

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Interview

• Two point releases have been released since Jan 14
• jQuery 1.4.1 
  • Features
    • Blog post
  • Notable Bugs
    • 25 bugs closed
• jQuery 1.4.2
  • Features
    • Blog post
    • Delegate/Undelegate
      • “Event Delegation with jQuery” by Brandon Aaron
      • Video of John Resig talk at the first jQuery Boston Meetup
    • Performance Improvements
      • 2x speed in the task speed test suite
    • Events Rewrite
      • “jQuery Click Outside Plugin” by Ben Alman
  • Notable Bugs
    • 40 Bugs closed
• jQuery 1.4.3
  • .bind(“click”, false) – shortcut for .bind(“click”, function() { return false; });
  • .unbind(“click”, false) – shortcut for .unbind(“click”, function() { return false; });
  • .click(false) – shortcut for .click(function() { return false; })
  • Faster jQuery Trim Forum Thread
• What is ahead for jQuery and future releases?
  • Mobile
  • Templating – Forum thread
  • Dynamic Script Loading

Wrap Up

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast. Follow Ralph and Elijah on Twitter as well.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

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Our Guest

Phil Haack. Senior Program Manager at Microsoft

Interview

• Who is Phil Haack?
  • Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
  • Oversees the ASP.NET MVC project
  • Lead Developer of the Open Source Subtext Blogging Engine
• ASP.NET MVC
  • Back in September 2008, Microsoft chose to include jQuery into the ASP.NET MVC template. This was the first time that Microsoft included any open source project alongside of their product.
  • Unlike ASP.NET WebForms, which more developers might have experience, ASP.NET MVC doesn’t inject a bunch of dynamically generated attributes and client-side script. Therefore, integration with jQuery is a very good fit and is similar to what it might be in other languages such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc…
  • ASP.NET MVC also incorporates Jörn Zaefferer’s jQuery Validation Plugin as part of their client-side validation strategy (based off of Steven Sanderson’s xVal project) in their MVC Futures project. The default client-side validation uses MS AJAX, but you can easily swap out these two validation frameworks. You can find an example of how to swap between the two on Phil’s blog
• Microsoft provides support for jQuery
  • If someone has a license for Visual Studio, a MSDN subscription, etc.. they can create a support ticket and someone from the Customer Support team at Microsoft will assist you in solving your jQuery issue.
• Phil has recently created some jQuery Plugins of his own
  • Live Preview Plugin
  • jQuery.Undoable Plugin

Sponsors

We thank our jQuery14.com sponsors, publishers and our gracious donors, all 653 of you.

Elijah’s Tutorial of the Week

• Quick Tip: Learning jQuery 1.4’s $.proxy by Jeffrey Way (NETTUTS)
• Using Inheritance Patterns to Organize Large jQuery Applications by Alex Sexton

Wrap Up

Phil Haack

• Blog: http://haacked.com
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/haacked

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast. Follow Ralph and Elijah on Twitter as well.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3.

Here are the show notes for this episode:

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Our Guest

David Walsh. Developer for MooTools JavaScript Framework

Interview

• Who is David Walsh?
  • Founder and Lead Developer for Wying Web Labs
  • Developer for MooTools JavaScript framework
  • Co-Founder of Script & Style
  • Co-Founder of Band Website Template
• jQuery vs. Mootools Debate
• What are some common JavaScript mistakes you often see beginners make?
• Website Optimization
  • YSlow Firefox Plugin
  • Page Speed Firefox Plugin
  • Sprite Me

Sponsors

We thank our jQuery14.com sponsors, publishers and our gracious donors, all 653 of you.

Ralph’s Plugin of the Week

• “YoxView – jQuery Image Viewer Plugin”
• David Walsh suggested: “Uniform – Sexy Forms with jQuery”

Elijah’s Tutorial of the week

• “Coding your First jQuery UI Plugin”
• “JavaScript Programming Patterns”

Wrap Up

David Walsh

• Blog: http://davidwalsh.name/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidwalshblog
  

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast. Follow Ralph and Elijah on Twitter as well.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

I would like to thank the following people that provided patches for this release: Ben Alman, Justin Meyer, Neeraj Singh, and Noah Sloan.

Downloading

As usual, we provide two copies of jQuery, one minified (we now use the Google Closure Compiler as the default minifier) and one uncompressed (for debugging or reading).

• jQuery Minified (24kb Gzipped)
• jQuery Regular (155kb)

You can feel free to include the above URLs directly into your site and you will get the full performance benefits of a quickly-loading jQuery.

Additionally you can also load the URLs directly from either Google or Microsoft’s CDNs:

• http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js
• http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js

New Features

A full list of the API changes can be found in the 1.4.2 category on the jQuery API site.

In this release we’ve added two new methods: .delegate() and .undelegate(). These methods serve as complements to the existing .live() and .die() methods in jQuery. They simplify the process of watching for specific events from a certain root within the document.

For example:

$("table").delegate("td", "hover", function(){
	$(this).toggleClass("hover");
});

This is equivalent to the following code written using .live():

$("table").each(function(){
	$("td", this).live("hover", function(){
		$(this).toggleClass("hover");
	});
});

Additionally, .live() is roughly equivalent to the following .delegate() code.

$(document).delegate("td", "hover", function(){
	$(this).toggleClass("hover");
});

What’s Changed?

There has been some large code rewrites within this release, both for performance and for fixing long-standing issues.

Performance Improvements

As is the case with virtually every release of jQuery: We’ve worked hard to continue to improve the performance of the code base, making sure that you’re provided with the best performing JavaScript code possible.

According to the numbers presented by the Taskspeed benchmark we’ve improved the performance of jQuery about 2x compared to jQuery 1.4.1 and about 3x compared to jQuery 1.3.2.

Specifically we’ve improved the performance of 4 areas within jQuery:

• The performance of calling .bind() and .unbind(). (Ticket)
• The performance of .empty(), .remove(), and .html(). (Ticket)
• The performance of inserting a single DOM node into a document. (Ticket, Additional Commit)
• The performace of calling $("body"). (Commit)

While comprehensive benchmarks like Taskspeed can be interesting if deconstructed into individual sub-tests for further study, as a project we tend to stay away from using them as an accurate measure of true, overall, library performance. Considering how many aspects make up a library, not to mention the different techniques that they offer, cumulative results rarely reflect how an actual user may use a library.

For example, we saw significant overall performance speed-ups in Taskspeed simply by optimizing the $("body") selector because it’s called hundreds of times within the tests. Additionally we saw large gains by optimizing .bind() and .unbind() by a fraction of a millisecond – an inconsequential amount – especially considering that any cases where you would bind hundreds of events you would likely want to use .live() or .delegate() instead.

We’ve collected some results from the other major libraries as well but are less interested in those results and far more interested in the performance improvements that we’ve made relative to older versions of jQuery itself.

We will continue to work on optimizing the jQuery code base – indefinitely. It’s always a major concern for us to try and provide the fastest JavaScript/DOM-development experience possible. And yes, there will likely always be ways to gain additional performance – either through internal optimizations or by pushing critical functionality off into browser-land for standardization.

Event Rewrite

The largest internal changes have come through a much-needed structural rewrite of the events module. Many quirky issues related to event binding have been resolved with these fixes.

Namely event handlers are no longer stored as object properties in jQuery’s internal object store (with metadata attached to the handlers). Instead they’re now stored within an internal array of objects.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to play around with .data("events") on a jQuery element you would find that it returns an object with all the event types currently bound, within it.

To enumerate some of the changes that have occurred during this rewrite:

• It’s now possible to bind identical handlers with different data, namespaces, and event types universally.
• Execution of event handlers will continue after one handler removes itself (or its sibling handlers).
• We no longer attach data/namespace information directly to the event handlers (only a unique tracking ID).
• We no longer use proxy functions, internally, to try and encapsulate handlers.
• Execution order of events is now guaranteed in all browsers. Google Chrome had a long-standing error in their object-looping logic that has been routed around.

As a side-effect of these changes we had to change the newly-exposed special add/special remove APIs in order to accommodate the new event data objects. Ben Alman is in the process of writing up a large tutorial on jQuery’s special event system and we will be making additional announcements when that occurs.

Bug Fixes

There were a total of 40 tickets closed in this minor release. Some relating to differences between jQuery 1.3.2 and jQuery 1.4.x, some fixing long-standing issues (like in the case of the event module rewrite).

Raw Data

This is the raw data that we collected to generate the aforementioned charts.

	jQuery 1.3.2	jQuery 1.4.1	jQuery 1.4.2	Prototype 1.6.1	MooTools 1.2.4	Dojo 1.4.1	YUI 3.0.0
FF 3.5	2182	806	 565	 2156	 1073	 575	 1885
FF 3.6	1352	677	 519	 2067	 857	 750	 1494
Opera	983	697	 222	 793	 678	 218	 1201
Safari	610	435	 252	 315	 235	 238	 612
Chrome	1591	703	 293	 271	 312	 222	 745
IE 8	2470	1937	 1141	 3045	 4749	 1420	 2922
IE 7	4468	3470	 1705	 9863	 10034	 1737	 5830
IE 6	6517	4468	 2110	 13499	 11453	 2202	 7295

We discuss the reactions to 14 Days of jQuery, Pros and Cons of the new API site, jQuery UI as well as many other topics. We also answered a listener question.

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3.

Here are the show notes for this episode:

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Listener Question

“This is Roger Phillips from san antonio. I’d like the Official jQuery Podcast to dig into ajax error handling with jQuery. There’s only a few scattered bits of best practices for this throughout the web and I’d like to hear how you guys handle it. And while your at it discuss the header that gets added to the ajax method, I can’t find any docs on it. And thanks to Yehuda Katz for the tip a couple of weeks ago. Thank you Guys.”

Wrap Up

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

Note: Since we’ve recorded this episode Ruby on Rails 3 Beta has been released.

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3.

Here are the show notes for this episode:

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Interview

• Who is Yehuda Katz?
  • Ruby on Rails Team Member
  • jQuery Team Member on the Core Team
• Intro to Ruby on Rails
  • A walk through a server side http request of JSON in Rails
  • XHR requests (jQuery now informs Rails via a header)
  • jQuery/Rails developers compared to Prototype/Rails developers
    • Prototype ships with Rails
    • Rails future and working with other libraries
• Other Projects
  • Engine Yard
    • Open Sources work – Full time on rails
      • Pulled into other projects related to rails
• jQuery 1.4 and Mailformed JSON
• Visual jQuery to be updated

Sponsors

We thank our jQuery14.com sponsors, publishers and our gracious donors, all 653 of you.

Plugin of the week

Ralph picks the Quicksand jQuery Plugin devloped by Jacek Galanciak as this weeks plugin of the week. Quicksand allows you to reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

Quicksand uses Easing effects and you can use the Easing plugins from jQuery UI.

“Transition” music, “Whip It” by Devo – the Devo hat was the inspiration for the original jQuery Logo and is still represented in our current identity.

Tutorial of the week

Elijah picks a couple of Tutorials the first being David Walsh’s “Fancy FAQs with jQuery Sliders.” A simple technique for creating a collapsible FAQ page. The second tutorial is from Scott Guthrie and his blog post about the jQuery 1.4.1 VSDOC file now available. If you want instructions on how to use the VSDOC you can read the tutorial on Learning jQuery. You can download the file for Visual Studio on the jQuery download page and look for Visual Studio link under 1.4.1.

Wrap up

Yehuda Katz

• Blog: http://yehudakatz.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/wycats

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

appendTo, provides training, support and consulting services to programmers and end-user enterprises who adapt jQuery into their front-end web development strategies. We provide world-class service and superior knowledge of jQuery and its uses in creating superior customer experiences.

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3.

Here are the show notes for this episode:

Permanent Sponsors

Interview

appendTo

• Services
  • Training
  • Consulting
• Company
  • Board of Directors
• Sponsoring the development of the jQuery Plugin Repository
• Contact appendTo
  • http://appendTo.com
  • 1-877-jQuery Help

jQuery Team Members

• jQuery Infrastructure team
  • Responsible for servers and web sites.
  • jQuery14.com
    • Oversaw and developed the word press implementation
    • Jonathan defends himself in the use of SiFR

Sponsors

We thank our jQuery14.com sponsors, publishers and our gracious donors, all 653 of you.

Plugin of the week

This week Ralph picked the GMap plugin developed by Cedric Kastner. A jQuery plugin that makes working with the Google Maps API easy. This plugin will be very handy by making it easy to plugin in coordinates that will be available with the geolocation services that are going to be apart HTML 5 spec.

Tutorial of the week

This week Elijah picked a tutorial from NETTUS called How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit (). From the tutorial, “QUnit, developed by the jQuery team, is a great framework for unit testing your JavaScript. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce what QUnit specifically is, and why you should care about rigorously testing your code.”

We also mention TestSwarm a distributed JavaScript testing service.

Finally, Ralph brings attention to the backwards incompatiability of jQuery 1.4 “jQuery() (with no arguments) no longer converts to jQuery(document).” Read more at http://api.jquery.com/jquery
.

Congratulations to the new jQuery Team Members:

• Paul Irish – Developer Relations Team
• David Methvin – Core Team

Wrap up

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

“jQuery Theme” created by Jonathan Neal

In this prerecorded episode from Washington DC, we sit down with David Artz, Director of Website Optimization at Aol. David talks to us about the conviences and challenges of using jQuery at the enterprise level.

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes or via the raw RSS feed or you can download the MP3.

Here are the show notes for this episode:

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Interview

• Who is David Artz?
  • Director of Website Optimization
  • Manage front-end development best practices (speed, SEO).
  • jQuery Performance Rules
• How Aol. currently uses jQuery
• Plugins that Aol uses
• Challenges Corporations like Aol face by using jQuery at the enterprise level
• How can companies contribute back to jQuery

Sponsors

We thank our jQuery14.com sponsors, publishers and our gracious donors, all 653 of you.

Plugin of the week

We have a little fun this week and play the new theme music for Ben Alman’s plugins. You might remember Ben from episode 6.

Tutorial(s) of the Week

Elijah recommends that you watch all of Paul Irish’s jQuery 1.4 Hawtness videos. #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6.

In addition, Elijah also recommends Ralph’s recent jQuery 1.4 Gives Us a New Way to Zebra Stripe blog post.

Even though this example isn’t the most efficient way to do zebra striping, it is a good example that demonstrates the new setter function that is now available in many methods in jQuery.

Wrap up

Follow the show on twitter for up to date information regarding live show times and upcoming guests at http://twitter.com/jquerypodcast.

You can send feedback about this episode or send in questions to podcast@jQuery.com or use the call-in number (804) 4jQuery, (804) 457-8379.

jQuery Theme Song by Jonathan Neal