jQuery Mobile 1.0 Released
April 2020 note: Hi! Just a quick note to say that this post is pretty old, and might contain outdated advice or links. We're keeping it online, but recommend that you check newer posts to see if there's a better approach.
When John Resig asked Filament Group to lead this exciting new project about 18 months ago, we had no idea where this would take us. Today, we are so thrilled to announce that jQuery Mobile has reached 1.0 status.
From the time we first launched the jQuery Mobile site last summer, we were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response to the principles of the framework. At the time we announced the project, most mobile developers and frameworks had adopted a pretty narrow target: iOS and maybe Android. In our mind, this was a very narrow slice of the web and left many billions of people unable to access important content and tools.
We knew there was an incredible opportunity to take a fresh look at the problem. At Filament Group, our goal is to strive for universal access – that’s what web is all about. For us, that meant that this project should embrace “one web” principles to ensure it worked on any device and for everyone.
We chose the challenging task of making this work on all popular mobile, tablet, e-reader and desktop browsers because the lines between these are blurring so quickly, only a broadly compatible and responsive design system would be future friendly foundation for this project. It took a lot of work, but I’m happy to announce that jQuery Mobile does indeed work pretty much anywhere, including feature phones and older browsers though our use of progressive enhancement. We also spent a lot of time testing and adding accessibility features to support screen readers like VoiceOver to ensure that nobody is left behind.
The other part of the universal access equation is making a JavaScript UI like jQuery Mobile toolkit easy to use and I think we’ve succeeded on that front by exposing all the configuration through HTML5 data- attributes which allows a less technical person to build a complex, AJAX-driven mobile app with simple HTML. Take a look at the getting started guide to get a sense of how easy it is to build a mobile website or app with jQuery Mobile. To make building custom themes, we designed the ThemeRoller tool to make it drop-dead simple to create a theme and download the stylesheet.
For a project that just turned 1.0 today, we already have a vibrant community of plugin and tool developers, eight published books (many more on the way), hundreds of sites and apps in production, and a ton of articles and tutorials. We’ve collected the best of these on a resources page on the mobile site. To get started, check out the demos and documentation site.
We’d like to thank all the sponsors and contributors to jQuery Mobile. It has been an honor to be part of this project and look forward to 1.1. A huge thanks goes out to Jorge Taylor, Kin Blas, John Bender and Tyler Benziger, and Ghislain Seguin for their incredible work this year on the project, we couldn’t have done it without you guys.
We’ve been pretty quiet here at the lab on the topic of jQuery Mobile because I’ve been writing more of the week-to-week updates over on the jQuery Mobile blog but look for us to be sharing ideas about how to use and extend the mobile framework.