productivity.appendTo( jQuery.ui )

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Like most open source projects, jQuery UI is maintained by a team of developers volunteering their spare time to the project. While we’ve been very productive at times, occasionally the team gets busy and productivity slows, sometimes almost to a halt. With new plugins to design and build, old plugins to maintain, and a growing community to support, the need for a more stable development pace has become increasingly more important. Today we’re happy to announce that you can expect greatly increased productivity starting immediately.

Scott González, the lead developer for jQuery UI, has accepted a position at appendTo, a worldwide provider of consulting, training and support for jQuery and jQuery UI. Earlier this month, Scott started his new job where he will be spending half of his time working on jQuery UI under a 1,000 hour contract between appendTo and the jQuery Project. It’s important to mention that what Scott works on will be determined solely by the jQuery UI team, not by appendTo or appendTo’s clients.

So what has Scott been working on? He’s currently going through every open ticket in the bug tracker (which was up to 800 at the beginning of the month). So far he’s made his way through the tickets for accordion and autocomplete. Combined, these two plugins had 83 open tickets when he started this triage. Now accordion has 8 open tickets (three of which are feature requests) and autocomplete has no remaining tickets. Scott has also made a lot of progress working through the fork queue on GitHub.

Having dedicated time to work on jQuery UI has additional benefits as well. By increasing Scott’s availability, other members of the team can be more productive with their volunteered time. Scott is also able to review pull requests and answer questions on the Developing jQuery UI forum in a much more reasonable timeframe. This is something that we’ve struggled with for a long time.

Stay tuned for more updates.

21 thoughts on “productivity.appendTo( jQuery.ui )

  1. friendlyjs on said:

    Excellent news, way to go Scott! Very much looking forward to a more productive jQuery UI! <3

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  3. “It’s important to mention that what Scott works on will be determined solely by the jQuery UI team, not by appendTo or appendTo’s clients.”

    appendTo is a company of jQuery ui developers, so doesn’t that make his work directed by appendTo by default?

  4. Awesome Guys. We do a lot of paid work on jQuery UI and we hope to roll out an LGPL PHP backend with deep jQuery / jQuery UI integration. So we are looking to have more components from UI team.

    We are really glad that we decided to go with jQuery UI and not ExtJS.

    Romans

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  9. Nikola on said:

    Congratulations, Scott! You’re work and the work of the entire jQuery and jQuery UI teams is phenomenal.

  10. I spend a lot of time in the enterprise space. I must say that this project has had a tremendous impact on both my productivity and my excitement for building web applications. I love to see that so many other projects, plugins and platforms are adopting it in their frameworks.Thank you for your efforts and Good Luck.

  11. good news,
    I am waiting for a few components which are designed for next milestones
    and that is a really good news

  12. Simon on said:

    Just because we NEED to be thankful for this great work: congratulations Scott !

  13. Steve on said:

    The UI widgets and level of control provided is outstanding. I use them in almost every project at work. Glad to see hear you are at a place where you can devote some of your time to jQuery development. I am sure I speak for many developers when I say thanks to all the people on the jQuery UI team.

  14. Hey Corey,

    appendTo is not a company of jQuery UI developers. In fact, I am the only person on the jQuery UI team that is employed by appendTo. There are other jQuery team members that are employed by appendTo, and appendTo was started by members of the jQuery infrastructure team, but there are also employees that are not on the jQuery team. I am the only employee at appendTo that is involved in prioritizing work for jQuery UI. I also happen to be the only appendTo employee that is a developer on the jQuery team. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

  15. I am working on a project that is jQuery based, and have been since January. I am all by my self working on this HUGE thing I have been designing since 2005. I don’t expect to be finished till the end of the year, and that is for the version titled BASIC. (As opposed to Personal, Professional, Commercial etc etc) I have a 1.0 out there and pulled it off the market. (Great sales 1st year out) I am working on the 2.0 version now. I was wondering how one goes about getting developers in on a project who are in the same position I am in, spending my free time, making sure there is nothing but free time, and working on my labor love. I have a concept that is needed by business owners, was written for a particular industry, requested by a real clients needs, and every owner of 1.0 today can’t function without it. So I know if I have 2.0 out there, advertised as “jQuery Based Cutting-Edge Technology blah blah 2.0…” I know it will turn some heads.

    Point of post, thank you for this deal, now you get paid to work on something you normally need to do but don’t get paid doing. I sure wish I can do that with my project without needing to parse out Copyright Slices to complete strangers/investors. I mean, I am counting on the success of your development to even be able to count on any success of my own.

    I placed all my JQuery and JQuery UI script tag URL’s in the database. This way I can switch between the different versions, CDN’s and beta versions in real time. Considering your picking up the pace, good time in my design. Hehehe

    If anyone is interested in being a developer of my project please contact me at cory@watchdogserver.com