Hi. > jQuery, along with plugins, covers a lot of what other > libraries do. I > just went looking around in dojo and YUI, and while one can do most of > what they do by combining plugins, what's missing is the kind of > bullet-proofing that people Alex Russell and Eric Miraglia have gotten > into their respective libraries by way tight management.
I can't second this one strongly enough. I develop lots of client side code myself, and my team also makes technology decisions at our company and writes guidelines that are then used by many many other authors. For my own work, prototyping, etc. I am solidly in the jquery camp. Hands down. No questions asked. For the stuff that my team rolls out to our audience of content authors, the jury is still out, and the pressure is on to adopt a client side UI library. The audience is similar I think to many webmasters out there who maintain web pages but may not have done enough DOM coding to appreciate how the jQuery core can save them time and expand their capabilities. I agree that having interns testing and enhancing plugin code would be useful, but only in the context of well documented conformance criteria. For the core I can point to this: http://docs.jquery.com/Browser_Compatibility And this: http://jquery.com/test/ And make an easy case that it would be safe to use this code on our site. The core has very few out of the box widgets though, which is what's generating excitement about UI libraries in my organization. If I could point to the jQuery plugin page as a list of features of the library: http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins And say "here's what you can do" I could also make a great case that we could do a lot of new and exciting things with the library. I can't do that right now because I don't know the status of each plugin with respect to these critical questions: 1. what browsers does it support? 2. is it under active development? 3. what versions of jQuery core does it work with and is there a commitment to a smooth upgrade path? 4. how has it been tested? 5. does it have dependencies/conflicts with any other plugins? In order for me to recommend it, a plugin would have to answer: 1. the same as jQuery core 2. yes 3. latest, yes 4. ideally I'd love to see a test suite... I'd be satisfied with seeing bug tracking history 5. dependencies are fine as long as they also satisfy the above. Conflicts may be acceptable, it depends. My guess is that among the jQuery plugins so many of them already meet this criteria that comparing the core + acceptable plugins to another library (yahoo, etc) jQuery would do quite nicely. But there's no way for me to know this right now. This is true with other libraries too, so it's not a beef about jQuery. It would just be an incredibly strong selling point if it was addressed. ------------->Nathan .:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.:||:._.: ||:. Nathan Young Cisco.com->Interface Development A: ncy1717 E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Miller > Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 9:56 AM > To: jQuery Discussion. > Subject: Re: [jQuery] Google's Summer of Code > > Here's the thing. > > jQuery, along with plugins, covers a lot of what other > libraries do. I > just went looking around in dojo and YUI, and while one can do most of > what they do by combining plugins, what's missing is the kind of > bullet-proofing that people Alex Russell and Eric Miraglia have gotten > into their respective libraries by way tight management. > jQuery's whole > philosphy runs counter to that, with a real spirit of "roll > your own". > It's led to some very cool and unlikely plugins, but they're not all > necessarily as stable as the core is. > > So, one thing I propose is that we take a list of > plugins/functionalities > that we want to have "officialized", and have one of the > programmers that > we get from SoC to just do a thorough review, squish all > bugs, test on all > supported platforms, and add some cool enhancements. > > One example: Kelvin Luck's date picker is a good calendar control > implementation. But, it does still require some work, and > it's also not > as flexible as Yahoo's calendar (although, one might argue > that Yahoo's > level of calendar features aren't necesarily desirable...) > > Also, there's a lot of work that Interface can use, even > though it gets > better every day. Sometimes, it seems like Stefan and Paul don't have > enough hands. This isn't a complaint, I'm just saying that they'd > probably appreciate as much help as they can get. Interface is big. > > Ideally, I'd like to see this: After the pick-a-plugin system > is deployed, > I should be able to go in and almost create a drop-in > replacement for any > other popular library that's out there today, and get at least that > library's level of hardness and fidelity. For example: if I > like the YUI > widgets, but I want to use jQuery, I should be able to check off > Core+Calendar+Interface+Menu, and I have something that's not only as > complete feature-wise as YUI, but something that's just as > bug-free and > cross-browser. > > Unfortunately, testing and hardening aren't the "cool" part of > programming. But, it's something that I think the whole project would > really benefit from. > > As for any other "little" features I'd like to see, I could use a good > time-picker control, and support for more advanced XPath selectors. > > If you're looking for something "big" and new, perhaps a port of Jack > Slocum's layout stuff? That might take more than an summer, > though. :) > > This is all just stuff to think about. I'm going pie-in-the-sky here. > > - Brian > > > > Hey Everyone - > > > > Google's Summer of Code has just opened up for 2007, and I'd love to > > have jQuery be a part of it: > > http://code.google.com/soc/ > > > > If you're not familiar with how SoC works, Google pays a number of > > college students to work on an open source project for an entire > > summer. This is a great opportunity for the kids, and for > the projects > > that they're supporting. > > > > In order to be able to apply, we'd have to come up with a list of > > things that we'd like them to do. So, I'm asking you (the jQuery > > community) what you think 1-3 decent coders could do for us for a > > summer? > > > > Some examples of good ideas (which should be expanded upon): > > - Build or port an unobtrusive charting plugin > > - Add jQuery support to a popular CMS/Framework > > - Build some interactive demos for jQuery.com > > - Add new functionality to Interface > > > > We're already working on the following improvements to the web site > > (so you don't need to ask for these): > > - A new plugins repository > > - A new forum area > > - A customizable download area > > > > Feel free to post your suggestions - all are welcome! > > > > --John > > > > > _______________________________________________ > jQuery mailing list > discuss@jquery.com > http://jquery.com/discuss/ > _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list discuss@jquery.com http://jquery.com/discuss/
