appMobi has open sourced jQ.Mobi, a rewrite of jQuery, competing with jQuery Mobile for developer mindshare.
jQ.Mobi is a partial rewrite of jQuery but optimized for HTML5 and mobile devices. It’s footprint is just 3KB compared to JQuery’s 35KB, and it is 3 times faster than jQuery on Android and 2.2x faster on iOS, according to a JSPerf test. The framework has been made available and open sourced by appMobi. The programming syntax for jQ.Mobi is identical to JQuery’s as it is its plugin development. jQ.Mobi contains only a subset of jQuery’s API, the one considered “essential” by appMobi in order to provide an identical user experience both on iOS and Android.
jQ.Mobi is made up of three components:
- the query library
- jQ.Ui – an UI library for WebKit browsers
- jQ.Plugin – plugin support for WebKit browsers
A demo is set up to show framework’s capabilities.
Why would someone create a new jQeury-based JavaScript framework when the jQuery team has released jQuery Mobile 1.0 two months ago? appMobi motivates their effort by the fact that jQuery has its roots in desktop browsers, and as a result the mobile version of their framework is not well optimized and it does not provide great experience on mobile devices, especially on Android.
Todd Parker, Mobile Lead at jQuery, has acknowledged some of the problems with jQuery Mobile, and the team has just announced a maintenance release (1.0.1) fixing a large number of bugs and more widgets and improvements to come in version 1.2.