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!
Why not just retire jQuery Mobile? You haven’t shipped a major release in 4 years the last minor release was 3 years ago. You’ve posted an update post 2 years ago and no release came of it.
jQuery UI hasn’t had an update in over a year.
This post should have just said these projects are in maintenance mode.
Thank you to all the people behind these projects. They’ve been invaluable to my development over the years. It is a sad day to see this post.
please dont break the css on this of all sites, it’s making me sad
by that i mean, use an <a> tag, not the full url, or word-wrap: break-word; i mean come on
Thanks for all the work you’ve been doing, and good luck for the future
Yooooo, come on, the appeal for jQuery and UI is a total fail when you can’t even render this page properly on mobile.
jQuery is useful, but this post with the URL stretching the bounds of the window is fail status
Thank you for your hard work! jQuery an it’s children are great project!
I mean, come on, 2009 is almost 10 years ago. Just retire the thing and focus and other more important stuff.
Sorry for the bad format. I’ve shortened the link to make it more usable as well
I think it is time to revamp both projects, let’s be honest, they were pretty useful before the react/angular era. Now we have react mobile and ionic to develop hybrid mobile apps. I still believe JQuery has an extraordinary team that is able to create a brand new tool for the modern web development and stop reusing components from almost a decade ago.
Don’t give in to the negative crap coming from the “react/angular/xyz” crowd. There are a ton of developers out here (myself included) that love jQuery and jQuery UI, and have been using them successfully for years, and have not bought into the whole ‘javascript==everything’ mentality.
I would love to see jQuery UI come back to life with new/updated widgets. I consider jQuery to be fundamental to my web development efforts, and I hope I never have to go down the black hole that is npm. JQuery does the job and does it well, and there are other good libraries out there that fill out the needs for basic MVC web development (moment.js, etc.).
Keep up the great work, don’t be discouraged, and know that there are many people out here rooting for your success.
Thank you all for you hard work on jQuery. I don’t utilize it a lot but the world needs jQuery, if only to allow good site development with excellent javascript capabilities without caving in to the now popular, bloated, bandwidth hogging, so-called ‘development’ platforms.
I admire your diligence in developing a strategy to handle the complex and multifaceted problem, including your willingness to make wide ranging adjustments. Managing a library that is used by every website on the internet is no simple task.it’s reassuring to see it in thoughtful hands.
Thanks for all your time for making jQuery UI and mobile, lets move on 🙂
Thank you for your contribution to this project
Come on! I use Jquery and Jquery UI in a daily basis. It just do what they are meant to do. It’s a sad day for me.
You made a really good work and I really want to thank you all, you are a big part of the internet history 🙂
Thank you for the commanding work of developing and maintaining a library for 10 years — This library brought hundreds (thousands?) of designers to code — Our bet is that jquery will still be here when react and the like are forgotten 🙂
I write all kinds of apps and jQuery is a dependency on most of them.
You guys allowed – fostered people like myself to keep the business running for almost a decade.
As far as future just keep up with any security related service packs if you don’t have any resources.
Although If you could dazzle me off Kendo mobile UI I would be will to through $100.00 USD your direction.
jQuery is awesome! Thank you all so much for your great work. It let me make great stuff and I cannot imagine web development without it. I guess maybe if you aren’t trying to make sophisticated stuff, you could get by without it, but for me, it lets me make jQuality!
While there will always be new libraries and frameworks that come out, few if any will meet the needs as well as jQuery / U / Mobile have. They are just simple and easy to use and setup.
I think there will always be a great need as long as you can keep up with the changing technologies.
Thank you all for your hard work on these great products.
I don’t think it’s the jQuery things, it’s more of the migration to other technologies. In our case, we had crossed over to Angular2 and TypeScript that does the heavy works for us.
jQuery is excellent. A great match for Ecmascript (Javascript). Just recently I started doing jQueryUI, like https://github.com/CapelliC/jquery.cctt
Back in the day, when javascript was monotonous and we had to worry about cross browser issues, jQuery was a light shining in the dark. I always hoped for jQuery UI and jQuery mobile to be the same, but they never lived up to it. Eventually I stopped writing jQuery plugins for sites, moved over to Angular and ReactJS, and left all of jQuery behind. That was a sad day for me, but it was years ago now.
I still think you could be a light, I just don’t know why you haven’t been able to get over that hump yet. Perhaps it is that you stick to just DOM manipulation and layout of widgets when new standards have come to steal your thunder away. Perhaps it is that Browser support of javascript is good enough now that it’s become harder to make an impact. Whatever it is, you will always be useful for beginners, but you’ve fallen too far back for professionals and that makes me sad (even though my tears dried up 4 years ago).
I hope this push helps revitalize you. I wish all the best for you. I’ll keep track of you and maybe someday…
jQuery is excellent. Thanks you so much.
jQuery is great for small websites. Web based business applications, portals, and other advanced projects needs a framework like Dojo, ExtJS, ReactJS, Angular, ect.
Thank you for your hard work. Keep going!
jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile are the the best!
1) What I am really waiting for a long time is the final release of jquerymobile 1.5!
2) I think, bringing together the two themes must be No 1 focus
3) Then Datetime picker ( with Globalize ). I looked into the code and it seems to be ready for production environment, just releas it!
That’s really all you have to do to keep leadership!
Just go on! Thank you for your hard work