This week a new version of jQuery, Version 1.5 was released. This release offers some new improvements and bug fixes from the previous 1.44 version release.
JQuery is today's most popular JavaScript library for making client side coding easier. It is used in over 40% of the 100 Million web sites on the Internet. It has been adopted by Microsoft to be used in their code. jQuery simplifies writing JavaScript scripts with a simpler, code syntax, that allows for the chaining of plug-ins and jQuery functionality together to achieve unique, dynamic web sites. JQuery is open source and is free to download and use by anyone.
The new 1.5 version fixed 83 bugs, and closed 460 tickets, and they've made some improvements in already good performance in some of the jQuery functionality.
The biggest improvement is a complete rewrite of the already popular Ajax module to achieve a more consistent programming interface for web site and plug-in developers. This will allow developers to create added unique functionality, and make the interface more extensible.
A brand new feature with this release is "deferred objects." Deferred objects is a chainable utility object that decouples the outcome of a task from the task itself. Some of the things you can do with them, that you couldn't do before, were put a series of callback functions into a queue for processing later, and monitor failure and success states of Ajax calls and respond to these events with additional callbacks after some other functionality has run. This has been in other libraries like Mochikit and Dojo for awhile. The rewrite of the Ajax jQuery library has made deferred object possible in jQuery.
Another new feature is the ability to clone a new version of jQuery while running jQuery. This would allow you to create a subset of jQuery functionality for a special situations or users group, for example.
JQuery has built up an extensive test suite for jQuery with some 4437 tests to ensure that jQuery is as stable and bug free as possible. Currently, jQuery has been verified on Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE. IE 6, 7, and 8 are supported.
Most important, is that the new version is compatible with the older versions of jQuery, so there is no reason not to upgrade to the new version on your web sites.
