from Hacker News

JQuery Mobile Framework Announced

by crescendo on 8/13/10, 8:30 PM with 55 comments

  • by jeresig on 8/13/10, 8:50 PM

    To preempt a few questions that are bound to pop up:

    What about jQTouch? While jQTouch is a great framework and we're proud to have it as part of the jQuery community - we really wanted a mobile framework to exist that would truly support all the mobile platforms out there. We chatted with the jQTouch team and there wasn't really any interest on their end to head in that direction. It's obviously going to be a ton of work - but that's something that the jQuery project is very interested in tackling.

    Is this a response to Sencha Touch? We've actually been working on jQuery mobile for a while now - long before Sencha Touch was released/announced. We're not particularly concerned with Sencha Touch mostly for the same reason that we're building an alternative to jQTouch: We want to support more platforms and do it in a completely seamless way.

    What data did you use to choose the browsers that you did? We've been talking with a number of mobile analytics firms and large corporations, gathering data, and will be releasing a bunch of the reliable numbers that we've collected on the jQuery mobile blog. Right now we're confident in the browsers and versions that we've chosen - although that'll likely change over the next couple months as the market shifts.

  • by jsdalton on 8/13/10, 9:32 PM

    The initial designs look outstanding: http://jquerymobile.com/designs/

  • by aaronbrethorst on 8/13/10, 8:54 PM

    This is very exciting news, especially knowing that this significantly better-looking theme is coming to desktop JQuery UI. One of my biggest issues with JQuery UI has always been how goofy it looks in comparison to Aristo and Ace (http://www.antipode.ca/2009/themes-sproutcore-vs-cappuccino/)

  • by wenbert on 8/14/10, 12:04 AM

    I feel that I owe John Resig a lot.

  • by weixiyen on 8/13/10, 9:21 PM

    How will it compare to jQTouch and sencha touch in terms of file size? Looking forward to it.

  • by jmtame on 8/13/10, 8:48 PM

    just to clarify--there's nothing that can be downloaded and used right now, correct? it looks like this is a pre-announcement of something they're building.

  • by pkulak on 8/13/10, 11:47 PM

    The design shots hint that you are going to have toolbars locked to the bottom of the screen. In Webkit that's impossible to do without taking control of everything yourself (including scrolling) ala Pastry Kit. Is that really what you guys intend to do, or is that just an over achieving mockup?

  • by lyime on 8/13/10, 9:03 PM

    This is great news. I have been working on a client project for a company to replicate the iPhone App Store in webkit (enterprisey)

    I have basically had to roll out my own framework with the help of jQtouch and jQuery. It's been a struggle to say the least, especially while trying to recreate some of the UI interactions such as the elastic scroll and animated slides.

    Looking forward to contributing to this project.

  • by stevenwei on 8/13/10, 10:18 PM

    This is great news. I had to hack apart jQTouch to get it to degrade more gracefully on non-Webkit browsers, and development seems to have stopped as the devs have moved onto Sencha Touch.

    Nice to see that the jQuery team is taking the project on, and I'll be very excited to use it once it is released.

  • by samratjp on 8/13/10, 10:04 PM

    Damn, this should give both SproutCore and Capuccino something to mull over, if not help build better builders.

  • by flog on 8/14/10, 1:38 PM

    Does anyone know if there's any source code in a public repo at the moment? I've been asked to present a talk on this, and would like to get in early.