jQuery 1.4 has been released, and it has brought with it what I think of as the second coming in terms of web scripting. We’ve had JavaScript for years. Ever since Netscape. However, it has taken a long time for people to do really interesting stuff with it, beyond your usual run-of-the-mill price calculators and so on.
JavaScript frameworks began popping up over the last few years with the aim of making it easier to make cool stuff with the added bonus of cross-compatibility, but there were still niggles. jQuery has become my framework of choice and it had the odd issue which annoyed me, in particular the slow-as-hell documentation site and certain speed issues in certain browsers (read: IE6-7).
However, jQuery is now getting ever more backing from major software companies and is being used across the web. The upshot of all of this? The new version has made certain functions up to 10x faster than in jQuery 1.3, which is damn impressive. Coupled with this, they have replaced the dog-slow Mediawiki based documentation site with a speedy WordPress installation, with complete documentation for every function, packed with examples and tracking of the changes throughout jQuery’s history, way back to 1.0 from 2006.
So you can now see why I think jQuery 1.4 is the second coming – of scripting.