I have had the pleasure to start working with the awesome jQuery team on a new mobile development. Today, John announced jQuery Mobile, “a unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.”

Palm has sponsored the effort with other great folks, and I wrote about it over here:

When we heard that the jQuery team was putting a lot of effort towards supporting their great library on devices, we wanted to help. At first we started with devices for John to test on as he explored compatibility, but with the newly announced jQuery Mobile initiative, we wanted to do more.

What are we doing? We are going to sponsor some of the great work that will go into jQuery Mobile from jQuery team members such as the Filament Group who are well known for their work on jQuery UI and ThemeRoller. First and foremost, we want to allow the team to focus on making a great jQuery experience across the mobile Web.

Secondly, we will be working hard to make sure that webOS itself is a fantastic host for the product. This will mean testing help, and also some jQuery plugins that show off some of the great abilities of webOS (e.g. the notifications system) in a progressive way.

We are really excited to be working with the team as their launch into jQuery Mobile en force.

Here are some more details on the goals of jQuery Mobile from Mr. John Resig himself:

“The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI framework. Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart showing all the browsers that we’re going to support. Right now we’re working hard, planning out the features that we want to land and doing testing against the devices that we want to support — and hoping for a release later this year. If you wish to help, please join the discussion in the jQuery Mobile Community. Our aim is to provide tools to build dynamic touch interfaces that will adapt gracefully to a range of device form factors. The system will include both layouts (lists, detail panes, overlays) and a rich set of form controls and UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs).”

It has been enjoyable to see the great touch and mobile support that YUI 3.2 is adding, and we look forward to hosting the Dojo team at Palm for one of their events. Sencha Touch and SproutCore are showing us that Web applications can feel like “native” apps on other platforms. All in all, the future for a cross platform Web application world is bright. We look forward to working with the entire community to make it happen.