The Future of jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile

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The last few years have been difficult for the jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects. The projects have suffered from lack of resources and funding and loss of contributors due to a variety of factors. These combined factors have nearly stopped development on both projects. To remedy this situation we have decided to make some changes in the projects’ teams in addition to how they work.



Scott Gonzalez has lead the jQuery UI project for many years now and has helped to improve the quality tremendously. He has decided to step down from leading the project though he will still be helping in various ways. In an attempt to best utilize resources we have decided to combine the 2 teams into a single team under the leadership of Alex Schmitz, a long time jQuery UI contributor as well as the lead for jQuery Mobile. What this means is that the combined contributors will be able to serve the projects better, since both projects are very tightly coupled as jQuery Mobile depends upon jQuery UI. This does not mean that the two projects will become a single project. Both projects will continue to exist in their own repositories. However, we do hope to continue reducing the amount of duplicated code and widgets in the projects moving anything common to jQuery UI. Eventually, making jQuery Mobile more of an app framework with all the widgets living in jQuery UI.



In the past, when someone wanted to join the jQuery UI or jQuery Mobile teams we expected them to contribute to the library as a whole. We think going forward this needs to change; we will now be looking for and accepting people that are just interested in maintaining a single piece of the library, requiring a much smaller time contribution. So, if someone is just interested in working on sortable they could just lead the sortable widget without having to contribute to any other parts of the two libraries. This will not only allow for more focused and less time consuming contribution but also allow better specialization within our team.



In the past we have done all communication through IRC. Over time however, we have seen a large decrease in the number of people on IRC while other projects have had great results with easier to use tools like Slack. As a result, we will be switching to Slack for daily communication and meetings. We hope that this will ease contributions and interactions with potential new team members. Anyone can join the new Slack channel by navigating to http://bit.ly/2Btf6pu



In conclusion, we are currently very interested in attracting new team members to the combined jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile team. Anyone who is interested can feel free to reach out to Alex Schmitz, the new team lead for both projects, join our slack channel or even find us on IRC (we are still there). jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile rely on contributions from the community and can only continue to exist with your help!