I'm very interested to see what the future holds for JQuery with these new JS micro-frameworks appearing around the web. I, for one, am a huge fan of JQuery and their entire team, but have recently switched to using Ender simply for the minimal bloat and it's fantastic package management.
I don't see jQuery going anywhere any time soon. On the other hand, I don't hold out much hope for jQuery UI. The majority of the development effort appears to be going the way of jQuery Mobile these days. They're establishing useful conventions that are expected to eventually filter back into UI, but there have been other jQuery UI components under development for years now. Twitter Bootstrap appears to have most of the web momentum, and I think it will take a concentrated effort for jQuery UI to compete - even if they're providing slightly different functionality.
The jQuery core team has discussed supporting advanced compilation with the Google Closure compiler. When compiled with user code, unused portions of jQuery would automatically be removed. This allows for minimal bloat without needing to manually assembling micro js libraries.
I, too, am excited to see what happens with jQuery. It's gotten to the point now (between the main lib, jq UI, and jq mobile) that the little snippets people extract from jQuery are becoming their own micro libraries, which is super cool. I've seen some things on github start as simple jQuery plugins and then be extracted into their own smaller library, basically. It seems like jQuery will become like a launchpad for developing smaller, as-needed libraries/frameworks. It'll provide the groundwork of something, and then once that something is perfected, all the rest of the bloat will be removed. Pretty neat, and I've found myself doing this twice in the past few months already.
I also think the jQuery source code will become more of a learning tool in the future; I've picked up so many neat things within JavaScript just by checking out some jQuery source, reading the comments, and then researching that particular thing on my own.
With jQuery now weighing in at ~150K, I would really like to see it split into smaller set of modules that can be picked a la carte. Sometimes all I need is animate() for a DOM element that I already have, and sometimes I need to select a set by a contrived selector, but nothing much beyond that.
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[ 42.8 ms ] story [ 3050 ms ] threadI see the sunsetting of relic Internet Explorer versions being the greatest "threat" to jQuery.
I also think the jQuery source code will become more of a learning tool in the future; I've picked up so many neat things within JavaScript just by checking out some jQuery source, reading the comments, and then researching that particular thing on my own.
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