JQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released | Hacker News Reader

JQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released

blog.jquery.com

50 pointsjohns11 comments

Congrats on getting closer to a new version!

Minified size, non-gzipped is almost 90k (up from 57k) -- will it stay this large?

Any news on the lite version?

We're checking out the Closure Compiler - it looks like with the simple compile options on it takes it back down to about 64KB minified, 21.6KB gzipped (a very modest increase over the last release, about 2-3KB).

(Un)fortunately we've been doing a ton of refactoring in this release. The internal structure of jQuery was a bit convoluted and needed some serious love. Needless to say things are much better now: We have cleaner code, consistency in variable names, and a better internal structure. All of this is leading towards a two-prong goal: Cleaner, more readable, code and the ability to dynamically load portions of jQuery, targeted toward mobile development.

jQuery 1.4 is the first step towards jQuery being the best possible JavaScript library for doing both desktop and mobile development - expect more details here soon.

Now THAT'S really exciting. I began doing mobile dev recently and I definitely feel the kilobyte pinch. Projects like XUI definitely help, but it'd be nice to use all the cool things that I'm used to from jQuery.

Good to hear about the refactoring and cleaning. There was definitely some cruft in there that made it hard to track down issues / learn from at times.

I'm very curious about the mobile announcement. I've been doing some heavy coding on top of jQuery for a soon to be released project. I've come close to ditching jQuery a few times due to the non-iPhone cachable size of the main script (a real dealbreaker for this project).

Keep on the great work. The alpha has passed all but two of my internal unit tests -- I'll track them down and submit bugs as necessary when I get some time over the next few days.

iPhone 3.0 devices can cache minified jQuery just fine - I've done some testing with an HTML5 offline app and they appear to have greatly increased the limits.

The jQtouch guys have been experimenting with this as well and have reported success: http://code.google.com/p/jqtouch/wiki/OfflineSupport

"jQuery 1.4 is the first step towards jQuery being the best possible JavaScript library for doing both desktop and mobile development". ..mobile development? Does that mean same app I created using jquery would run both on a pc and a smart phone? Wow..That would make me a very happy programmer.

That's the plan! Right now we're in the process of collecting phones from mobile manufacturers for testing. We want to, first, add these devices into our development and testing workflow so that we can support them fully. Once we've done that we'll be able to start shipping custom mobile-tailored builds of jQuery that strip out unnecessary code and add in mobile-specific stuff.

Ideally though we should be shipping a single JS file that you can embed in your web site and know that it'll work on both the desktop and on a smart phone.

When you say desktop, do you mean web-based development or do you mean client-side apps? If the latter, in what context are you thinking?

Sorry, I was using "desktop" to mean web-based development in browsers that are typically running on PCs, Macs, laptops, etc. It might be nice to do some additional testing against some of the desktop app environments (Titanium, Air, etc.) but we don't currently have that slated.

As happy as I am with jQuery, I'm really excited to see the following:

-append, prepend, etc. have been heavily optimized

-find, empty, remove, addClass, removeClass, hasClass, attr, and css have been heavily optimized

I'm a lazy bastard. So, has anyone else done some benchmarks for me?

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