16 August 2010, 12:04

jQuery Mobile Project announced

jQuery Logo The jQuery Project developers have announced the launch of the jQuery Mobile project, a new project for a cross-platform mobile version of their JavaScript framework. According to jQuery creator John Resig, as part of the new mobile project, the core jQuery library is being improved to work across the various major mobile platforms and their browsers. Resig says that the developers are working to release "a complete, unified, mobile UI framework". Current expectations are that this will be completed in late 2010.

Using a graded browser support chart, the team have sorted the various mobile browsers into several categories: A and B-grade for high and medium quality browsers that support, for example, JavaScript and CSS. Grade C browsers (low quality) don't support these technologies, while F-grade browsers barely function.

The project aims to provide the necessary tools to create dynamic touch interfaces that will "adapt gracefully" to devices running different operating systems. Initially the jQuery developers plan to work on supporting all of the A and B grade browsers and they have already started planning on features to implement for the devices they plan to support, including those running MeeGo, bada, Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS, Android, Symbian and Apple's iOS.

The project has already received sponsorship from various mobile browser vendors, including Palm (now owned by HP) for its webOS platform and Mozilla with its Mobile Firefox browser. The developers have created a new Mobile jQuery forum and welcome feedback from the community.

More details about the jQuery Mobile Project can be found in a post on the jQuery Mobile blog by Resig. A complete strategy overview and chart of browsers that the developers plan to support are available on the project's site. jQuery is dual licensed under the MIT or GPL version 2 (GPLv2) licenses.

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