This is indeed a momentous day for the jQuery team with three major announcements; The release of jQuery 1.3, “Sizzle” (the new css selector engine) and the launch of a new API Documentation browser.

jQuery 1.3

As previously mentioned the new release is mainly about performance which in my book is always good. I really appreciate projects that are willing to go back over their work and improve it for the better.

Most important in this new release is Sizzle, the new CSS selector engine but more on that in a bit. Also in this release is a rewritten event engine, rewritten HTML injection engine which makes appending HTML even faster and my favourite’, the complete removal of all browser sniffing which has been replaced by feature detection. So the lightweight and nippy jQuery just got even nippier!

Live Events are another new feature in 1.3, they allow a developer to attach events to current and future elements through event delegation.

The full 1.3 release notes can be found here

Sizzle – The new CSS selector engine

In 1.2.6, jQuery already had a very fast CSS selector engine, even noticably so when compared to Prototype 1.6 however the new ‘Sizzle’ engine has taken jQuery’s performance to an even greater height.

If you are a stickler for the numbers you can find them here

The big news with Sizzle it is a new standalone public project with an aim to bring together more creators developers to work on a unified selector engine.

More importantly, though, we’re taking a big leap with Sizzle: We’re releasing it as a completely standalone project to be collaborated upon by many library creators and developers. We saw an opportunity to give something back to not just the jQuery community but to the JavaScript development community as a whole; and at the same time be able to collaborate with developers of other libraries on a single, unified, selector engine. We feel that there’s too much competition and not enough collaboration occurring and so we put our code out on the line as a good first step towards working together.

In addition, Sizzle has been handed over to the DoJo Foundation;

As a sign of good faith and willingness to collaborate, we’ve turned over Sizzle to the Dojo Foundation (an excellent non-profit well suited for this project, not to be confused with the Dojo Toolkit). We wanted a common meeting ground where all developers would be able to work together and under which there would be a clear long-term copyright holder.

The Sizzle project can be found at http://sizzlejs.com/

New API Documentation Browser

Any project is only as good as it’s documentation in my book and this is one thing that jQuery has done well with, right from when I started using it in September 2007 and quite probably before.

Remy Sharp has taken the API documentation and moulded it into an even more impressive format, written in both jQuery and Adobe AIR. The new API browser can be found at http://api.jquery.com/ and really does work very well.

Having the option of downloading the API as a windows application really does appeal to me so kudos to Remy for the port to AIR.

So there you have it, lots of new activity in the jQuery arena, now if I could just get my hands on some promotional merchandise (t-shirts) I would be over the moon. Ah well, I guess today’s news will have to do

Oh, I should probably add that today, January 14th, is jQuery’s birthday, well 3rd birthday to be exact so Happy Birthday jQuery.