Version 1.3 of the JavaScript library jQuery has been released featuring Sizzle, a brand new CSS selector engine which offers significant performance gains for the most frequently used selectors. Along with the release, a new API browser was presented which is available online or as an Adobe AIR application and can accommodate live running examples with which the developers can experiment.
The most notable features of the new release are:
- Sizzle which is a standalone, fully extensible and faster CSS selector engine.
- A heavily refactored event’s system
- The addition of “Live Events” that can be bound to all current - and future - elements.
- Lightning-fast HTML appending.
- Rewrite of the offset method for more speed.
- Replaced browser sniffing with feature detection, where it simulates a particular browser feature or bug to verify its existence.
The jQuery Team aims to do a follow-up jQuery 1.3.1 release soon to catch any straggling bugs that might have slipped through.
As James Hart reports there seems to be a problem regarding the use of v1.3 with Visual Studio at this time:
…reference JQuery 1.3 from a file in VS2008, and intellisense falls over in a heap. Looks like there’s something in the new Sizzle CSS selector library component of JQuery that VS just doesn’t like. That disables all JavaScript intellisense in the referencing file. It’s a real shame; MS went above and beyond releasing a pre-SP1 hotfix that enabled intellisense to be compatible with jQuery 1.2, and I know the VS guys have a completely overhauled intellisense engine coming in the next version of VS. But right now, it looks like something in Sizzle’s capability detection code throws the current VS2008SP1 code for a wobbler.
Luckily, if you’re using a -vsdoc.js file to augment jQuery, intellisense doesn’t fail because it ignores the actual jQuery source file. Unfortunately, there’s no intellisense file for JQuery 1.3.
James has developed a JQuery 1.3 intellisense header file which as he claims is a partial solution to the problem.
You can find more information on JavaScript and Rich Internet Applications right here on InfoQ.