jQuery Mobile Open Source Framework Support for Windows Phone

Hello web and mobile developers!

As you probably noticed, jQuery Mobile version 1.0 was announced this week. We are pleased to use this exciting occasion to reinforce our commitment to supporting popular open source mobile frameworks.

Of the most recent activities, I want to highlight the work done to supporting PhoneGap by adding support for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), and now we are moving up the stack to improve support of jQuery Mobile on Windows Phone 7.5.

As you probably know, jQuery Mobile framework is a Javascript HTML5-based user interface system for mobile device platforms, built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.

While today’s version 1 and the recent RC releases contain many features, we wanted to take a minute and highlight the collaboration we started with the jQuery Mobile team. In the last few weeks we have focused our attention on supporting Kin Blas and others in the community to improving the performance on Windows Phone 7.5.

In particular, as the RC3 blog published earlier this week outlines, Windows Phone performance has improved quite dramatically as shown by the two showcase apps:

  • 226% improvement in rendering the form gallery, bringing it down from 5 to 2.2 seconds
  • 20x improvement in rendering the complex 400 item listview, from 60 seconds to 3 seconds

The jQuery team has additional performance optimization tips for Windows Phone in the change log that saves additional perf time in certain scenarios.

We are pretty encouraged with this progress, and will continue working with community to bring higher levels of performance and support for jQuery features to Windows Phone... stay tuned, and congratulations again to the jQuery Mobile Team!

 

Abu Obeida Bakhach

Interoperability Strategy Program Manager