Simon Willison’s Weblog

When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop. Slack appear to have pulled off the almost impossible: finishing a complete, incremental rewrite of their core product. They moved from jQuery to React over the course of two years, constantly shipping new features as they went along. The biggest gain was in rewriting their code to support multiple workspaces, which means desktop client users no longer have to run a separate copy of Electron for every workspace they are signed into. # 22nd July 2019, 6:30 pm

React is the new Dojo. In which Mikeal Rogers provides his perspective on the history of Dojo, the earliest break-out JavaScript framework, how jQuery eclipsed it and contemplates the same thing eventually happening to React. # 20th October 2017, 12:22 am

jQuery 1.4.3 Released. Once again, the thing that impresses me most about this jQuery release is how stable the core API is. Hardly any new methods added, but the existing methods are made faster, more flexible and more predictable. The same as been true for the past several releases as well. It just keeps getting more and more polished. # 17th October 2010, 12:15 am

Backbone.js. As should be expected for a DocumentCloud project, Backbone is a concise, elegant and educational take on the JavaScript MVC pattern. Depends on Underscore.js and plays well with jQuery. # 13th October 2010, 5:23 pm

jQuery.queueFn. “Execute any jQuery method or arbitrary function in the animation queue”. I’m surprised this isn’t baked in to jQuery itself—the plugin is only a few lines of code. # 30th June 2010, 12:59 pm

Pure CSS3 Spiderman Cartoon w/ jQuery and HTML5. Great demo, though calling -webkit-animation HTML5 (or even CSS3) is a bit of a stretch... # 4th May 2010, 7:27 pm

Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery. I’m using this jQuery plugin to save some bandwidth when people first view my Redis tutorial slides. It unobtrusively replaces images on a page with a placeholder graphic, then sets them to load automatically as the user scrolls down the page. # 26th April 2010, 12:02 am

jQuery special events. Ben Alman’s comprehensive guide to jQuery’s special events API, which allows you to register new kinds of events that can then be attached and detached using jQuery’s bind and unbind methods. Ben’s clickoutside event is a particularly useful example. # 17th April 2010, 9:08 pm

jQuery UI: Trying to manipulate the position of a draggable mid-drag doesn’t seem to work. This has bitten me on two separate projects now—it’s the only problem I’ve had with jQuery UI’s draggables, which have otherwise been fantastic. # 11th April 2010, 9:59 pm

jQuery source viewer. A neat way of browsing the source code of jQuery itself, complete with hyperlinks to other jQuery methods. Kind of a single-purpose IDE. I can see myself using this a lot. # 1st February 2010, 10:01 am

HTML 5 audio player demo. Scott Andrew’s experiments with the HTML5 audio element (and jQuery)—straight forward and works a treat in Safari, but Firefox doesn’t support MP3. Presumably it’s not too hard to set up a fallback for Ogg. # 1st February 2010, 9:58 am

Dojo 1.4.1 vs jQuery 1.4.2pre on Taskspeed. John Resig’s reponse. When JavaScript libraries compete on performance, everybody wins. # 29th January 2010, 2:19 pm

Dojo: Still Twice As Fast When It Matters Most. Alex Russell shows how Dojo out-performs jQuery on the TaskSpeed benchmark, which attempts to represent common tasks in real-world applications and has had code that have been optimised by the development teams behind each of the libraries. # 28th January 2010, 10:40 pm

jQuery 1.4 Released. With comprehensive release notes. Huge performance improvements and a ton of very sensible enhancements to the API—far too many to summarise. # 14th January 2010, 10:37 pm

qTip. Advanced tooltip plugin for jQuery, including borders and pointers created using CSS. Very flexible (we used this for the latest MP expenses application) but a little on the heavy side, weighing in at 38KB when minified. # 30th December 2009, 6:23 pm

tipsy. Simple Facebook-style tooltip plugin for jQuery. # 30th December 2009, 6:21 pm

jQuery.require() implementation. John Resig has added a new jQuery.require() function to a jQuery development branch, for release as part of jQuery 1.4. The commit on GitHub has an extensive discussion attached to it (scroll to the bottom). # 17th December 2009, 11:24 am

jQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released. Impressively the new version contains no new features at all (correct me if I’m wrong), instead focusing on significant performance improvements to the existing API. # 5th December 2009, 5:31 pm

jQSlickWrap. Clever jQuery plugin which allows text to wrap around irregularly shaped images, by processing the image with canvas and rewriting it as a sequence of floated horizontal bars of different widths. It’s a a modern variant of the the ragged float trick first introduced by Eric Meyer. # 23rd November 2009, 7:44 am

Underscore.js. A new library of functional programming primitives for JavaScript—each, map, all, any, inject, detect etc. Unlike some similar libraries this one doesn’t extend the built-in objects, instead opting to bind the new functions to the underscore symbol. A jQuery-style noConflict() option is available if even that is too much namespace pollution for you. # 28th October 2009, 5:08 pm

BBC: Glow (via) The BBC have released Glow, their jQuery-like JavaScript library developed in house over the past few years. It’s open source under the Apache license. # 8th July 2009, 3:25 pm

SWFUpload jQuery Plugin. Nice looking plugin around an invisible Flash shim that provides multiple file uploads and client-side progress indicators. # 16th June 2009, 11:46 am

Dojo 1.3 now available. Looks like an excellent release. dojo.create is particularly nice—I’d be interested to know why something similar has never shipped with jQuery (presumably there’s a reason) as it feels a lot more elegant than gluing together an HTML-style string. Also interesting: you can swap between Dojo’s Acme selector engine and John Resig’s sizzle. # 1st April 2009, 12:19 am

Special Events in jQuery. How to add a custom “tripleclick” event to jQuery, using the jQuery.event.special extension hook. # 30th March 2009, 10:15 am

Combine JSONP and jQuery to quickly build powerful mashups. jQuery’s JSONP support is one of my favourite little-known features of the library. # 3rd March 2009, 3:17 pm

jQuery Sparklines. Delightful Sparklines implementation, using canvas or VML in IE. A neat nod towards unobtrusiveness as well: you can specify your data as comma separated values inside a span, then use a single jQuery method call to convert the span in to a sparkline image. # 27th February 2009, 8:43 pm

Oscars 2009: the interactive results | guardian.co.uk. My latest project for the Guardian, put together on very short notice. Updates live as the results are announced, and allows Twitter users to vote on their favourite for each category by sending a specially formatted message to @guardianfilm—jQuery and Ajax polling against S3 under the hood. # 23rd February 2009, 2:19 am

jQuery.Rule (via) jQuery plugin for manipulating stylesheet rules. For me, this is the single most important piece of functionality currently missing from the core jQuery API. The ability to add new CSS rules makes an excellent complement to the .live() method added in jQuery 1.3. # 22nd February 2009, 5:53 pm

jQuery 1.3.2 release notes. Not just a bug fix—there are a number of subtle behaviour changes, including to the :visible/:hidden selectors and the appendTo/prependTo/*To family of methods. I strongly recommend testing and reviewing those changes before upgrading. # 21st February 2009, 4:42 pm

jQuery 1.3.1 Released. Bug fix for 1.3, mainly browser compatibility issues. Of interest: jQuery no longer ship a packed version (where JS is used to further decompress a string), as their tests show that this reduces performance due to the overhead of the extra decompression. They still provide a YUI Compressor minified version. # 22nd January 2009, 10:41 am