John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, looks back when JQuery was born:

I remember doing the first release at BarCamp NYC (combined with the mention of two other projects of mine that fizzled: Feed Pile and Idea Shrub). While I had released a bunch of open source code in the past, this was the first one that I put some serious effort into getting publicity. Luckily it made it onto del.icio.us/popular, digg - and the rest is history.

Surely, today his baby is growing up fast. Congrats John!

To celebrate 2nd birthday of this great framework, the team has a new release, 1.2.2. Primarily, this has been a bug fix and optimization release. They landed over 120 bug fixes with more than 1157 tests in it. Some major changes are:

• 300% Speed Improvements to $(DOMElement)
• .ready() Overhaul: Uses Diego Perini’s non-document.write() technique, now wait for CSS to be ready, can now watch for the document ready event via the traditional .bind()
• .bind(”mouseenter”) / .bind(”mouseleave”)
• Complex :not()
• Accepts Headers
• Event API: jQuery.event.special setup teardown handler

The latest release can be downloaded here.

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Looking for Prototype/script.aculo.us replacement on Rails? jRails project can be an answer if you prefer JQuery. Here is info from project site:

Features

jRails provides drop-in functionality for these existing Rails methods.

Prototype

• form_remote_for
• form_remote_tag
• link_to_remote
• observe_field
• observe_form
• periodically_call_remote
• remote_form_for
• submit_to_remote

Scriptaculous

• draggable_element
• drop_receiving_element
• sortable_element
• visual_effect

RJS

• hide
• insert_html
• remove
• replace
• replace_html
• show
• toggle

Visual Effects

The visual effects in jRails are based on the new jquery-fx library. jRails currently uses a slightly modified version of jquery fx code to get some of the desired effects. This code is evolving and is subject to change. In the meatime, you can get a taste of the visual effects that… Read more »