jQuery Mobile has reached the Beta 1 milestone with support for all major browsers and mobile OSes. A final release is expected by the end of the summer.
jQuery Mobile is a touch-optimized JavaScript framework for creating cross-device web applications targeted at smartphones and tablets. Since it is built on jQuery’s core 1.6 and UI, the mobile framework works on desktop browsers as well. Currently in Beta 1, the framework has a very small memory footprint of 20KB of compressed JavaScript code, and another 7KB of compressed CSS code. The general release is planned for late summer after another beta due in 4 weeks.
jQuery Mobile is HTML5 friendly, and it consists of a number of UI components that run on a large number of devices, such as: Pages&Dialogs, Toolbars, Buttons, Forms, Lists, and Content formatting. The framework also has an API for dealing with Events (touch, orientation, scrolling, page, animation), Themes, and other plumbing settings.
jQuery Mobile has been made available and tested on all major mobile browsers and many mobile devices including iOS, Android, WP7, Blackberry, Palm WebOS, and Kindle 3. On Blackberry 5, Opera Mini and WP 6.5, the framework does not support Ajax due to some problems with the browsers running on those respective platforms. Not supported yet: Nokia S60, but support is to be added in Beta2, Meego, and this platform will not be supported because Nokia has stopped its development, Samsung Bada for lack of test devices, and Palm WebOS 3 with support coming in the near future when devices are available for testing.
While an application is written once and is supposed to run all a large variety of devices, the jQuery team draws attention to the fact that the “visual fidelity of the experience is highly dependent on CSS rendering capabilities of the device and platform “, and “we’ll be adding additional vendor-prefixed CSS rules to bring transitions, gradients and other visual improvements to non-WebKit browsers in future releases so look for even more added visual polish as we move towards 1.0.”
The source code of the framework can be accessed on GitHub jQuery Mobile.