jQuery Mobile and Developers: Putting It All Together

Over the weekend, the alpha release of jQuery Mobile was announced at the Boston jQuery conference. jQuery Mobile is a user interface framework for mobile devices built with jQuery, a full-featured JavaScript library.

By using jQuery Mobile, developers are able to create apps for many mobile devices, including most smartphones and tablets. The current alpha release supports iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), Android, Blackberry OS6, HP’s webOS, Mozilla’s Fennec and Opera Mobile. Other platforms are in the works, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, MeeGo and others.

As stated on the jQuery Mobile website, the following features will be included in the final release:

• Progressive Enhancement — as the folks at jQuery say, progressive enhancement is “taking a fully functional HTML web page, layering on additional JavaScript functionality, and giving capable browsers a top-of-the-line experience”

• Graceful Degradation — older web browsers will still be capable of allowing visitors to experience the experience of your website
• Accessibility — all of the jQuery Mobile components are Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) accessible
• Simplicity — jQuery Mobile is 100% markup-driven, requires no JavaScript configuration
• Small File Size — the JavaScript for this release is 12KB and the CSS is 6KB, and uses a limited number of images, mostly icons
• Theming — features a comprehensive theming structure