jQuery Mobile Alpha 1 arrives with demos and documentation

jQuery Mobile, a user interface framework built on top of jQuery, has released its first alpha. It includes components, layouts, and theming tools to greatly simplify the process of building applications that target mobile devices. The team claims there are two guiding principles of the jQuery Mobile project that differentiates it from most other offerings: it's completely built on the principle of progressive enhancement and is designed to be functional in all HTML-capable mobile browsers. jQuery says the release was made possible thanks to the contributions of seven companies: Filament Group, Palm, Research in Motion, Adobe, DeviceAtlas, Mozilla, and Nokia.

jQuery Mobile 1.0a1 includes demos and documentation for all the included components: theming and layout, headers/footers (fixed and persistent), form controls, dialogs, list views, events, and transitions. You can grab them all over at the unified demo application.

Released in January 2006, jQuery is a free cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML and allow developers to create plugins on top of its library. The open source software is dual-licensed under the MIT License and the GNU General Public License version 2. Used by over 31 percent of the 10,000 most visited websites, jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library mainly thanks to its syntax, which is designed to make it easier to navigate a document, select DOM elements, create animations, handle events, and develop Ajax applications.