I’ve been convinced for some time that jQuery is the best JavaScript library around. What I am coming to realize is that it’s also one of the best-run open source projects around as well. jQuery 1.3 (released today) has a new selector engine, a key component of any modern JavaScript library. To encourage other projects to adopt their selector engine, the jQuery project has turned it over to the Dojo Foundation, which currently manages the Dojo Toolkit, a jQuery competitor:
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 coud out on the line as a good first step towards working together.
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.
January 14, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I totally agree – I’ve been using it for large and small projects for the last year and have been very impressed.
January 17, 2009 at 9:22 am
I am not surprised. Before Sizzle’s official release, some folks on the MochiKit mailing list were discussing using it to replace the slow implementation of MochiKit.Selector. John jumped into the discussion and was supportive and helpful towards the MochiKit team’s efforts.