Has jQuery core development been slowing down?

Question

So, I regularly head over to jQuery's Commit History on GitHub just to read through the new code committed to jQuery core.

But there hasn't been anything new committed since April 24th.

I've already read through jQuery core a few times and I'm pretty familiar with it which is why I like reading the commits. I just like to see what changed, why it was changed, etc.

Why has there been a slow down in jQuery commits on GitHub? Anyone else have some recommendations for where I can go to view good javascript code being developed?

My motive for reading jQuery's commit history is similar to the reasons I browse through accepted answers here on stackoverflow - to learn from people smarter than me. With that said, I am interested in the answer to this questions title, but I am more interested in finding a substitute to reading the jQuery commits.

Answer 1

I just chatted with John Resig, and he gave me the lowdown. As jAndy suggested, John has been doing a ton of jQuery work with various mobile platforms lately. From the github commits, it does sort of look like development has stalled. But a lot is going on that isn't rolled into anything presentable yet. You can expect to start seeing a trickle of commits very soon, though, dealing with jQuery 1.4.2 bugs and any other hot issue/pull request that has arisen in the past month or two.

Answer 2

I just happened to be listening to the latest yayquery.com podcast and John Resig answers part of my question.

In a discussion regarding jQuery and mobile:

Paul Irish: "I haven't seen check-ins to the git repository. You're keeping the work, the mobile stuff, to local changes at the moment?"

John Resig: "Not really. Most of the work up until now...there has been maybe a half dozen commits relating to mobile to core and sizzle. But the vast amount of work that goes into this, the vast amount of work that I've been working on the last two months, has been all research and testing.
It is monumentally hard because the problem I was faced...like I sat down and I was like 'Alright, I want to make sure jQuery core works on mobile phones.' and it seems like a reasonable goal. But the problem is that you have to define the problem space.

• What mobile phone exist?
• What are popular?
• On those phones what browsers are actually used?
• And breaking down from that: which ones are actually capable of running modern JavaScript code?

And no one has answered this question. It is a completely unanswered question. The closest I've seen is some of the research by PBK of quirksmode and he's looked at some of the webkit browsers and the functionality contained in them. But he didn't really go beyond that. Webkit browsers (webkit based browsers) are the top of the litter, you know? Supporting them really isn't an issue. Its all the other browsers that are really popular.

So, it looks like jAndy is correct...development has, in fact, slowed...but research for it has not. I'd like to think John's recent work on TestSwarm has been to assist his jQuery mobile-browser compatibility research.