Last week Packt Publishing announced the winners of the 2010 Open Source Award, I had the chance to be one of the official Judges for the JavaScript Category, and you may pardon me for sharing this one week later as I was traveling last week. I used to be very familiar with most JS libraries available, and I was not surprised at all when the result announced was exactly as I voted. Winner this year of the 2010 Open Source Award – JavaScript Libraries – is jQuery, and the 1st runner up is shared between Raphael JS and Mootools.
jQuery benefit from the largest community compared to all other JavaScript libraries and that’s their biggest advantage. The library performance, usability, and ease of use helped to make its adoption higher in many small and large projects. Few years ago, my only take on jQuery was that 3rd party development was maintained by personal developer’s efforts, which make upgrade not fun at all. Today there is an answer with UI and mobile project. There is still lot of work to do, and I think they are on the right path.
RaphaelJS however have the smallest community, and it’s doing amazing work as it’s more specialized library compared to all others. The library need more support and adoption to complete its goals, improve performance, and come with more innovative ideas in the future related to JavaScript vector drawing for the web, and mobile !
Below the press release :
Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that jQuery has won the inaugural Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Award is a new category introduced to the Open Source Awards this year, featuring libraries of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), visually enhanced applications or smoother server-side JavaScript functionalities.
“On behalf of the entire jQuery Team, let me first say thanks to Packt Publishing for this award. I’d also like to give a huge thanks to the community of designers and developers that use jQuery daily and felt the urge to vote for jQuery as their favorite JavaScript library. We’ll use this prize to further the development of the jQuery Project.” Said Ralph Whitbeck, jQuery core team member.
“While jQuery hasn’t undergone any radical change in the past year, the project has continued to evolve at the same frenetic pace and the 1.4 release included a wide range of small but important improvements.” Added Michael Mahemoff, Google developer advocate, HTML5/JavaScript specialist and one of the judges for the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category. “jQuery covers all bases as its performance is high priority, it is easy to use, has a huge community, great documentation, and an excellent plugin ecosystem.”
While jQuery occupied the top spot in the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category, the other two extremely popular finalists Rapha
