Is jQuery Mobile ready for production use?

Question

I've been meaning to use jQuery Mobile for a client project that is to go live in about 2 months (in the end of April) but I can't seem to find any roadmap for jQuery Mobile.

It is now in Alpha 3 stage. There were only one month between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 but about two and a half months between Alpha 2 and Alpha 3.

According to the Bug Tracker, jQuery Mobile has 231 open issues where many of them are critical or high or even 2 with status Blocker.

I really wan't to use this framework because of it's ambition to reach so many clients and my feelings for jQuery in general :) But is it wise at this point in time?

Update 2011-03-04

According to http://jquerymobile.com/2011/02/jquery-mobile-alpha-3-released/: "Right now we’re planning on releasing the first beta within the month before moving on to our 1.0 release."

According to sidneyallen: "#jquery mobile Beta ETA is mid to late April. Overheard at Bay Area Mobile meetup."

Update 2011-03-23

According to jQuery Mobile's official Twitter account, jQuery Mobile Alpha 4 should be released within a week and beta should be out by San Francisco jQuery conference which is held April 16-17.

Update 2011-04-30

Yes, jQM Alpha 4 was indeed released a week after my last update with lots of improvements. The beta was at this point in time still planned to be released by mid-April in time for the jQuery conference.

April 7th, the team release jQM Alpha 4.1 which was a maintenance release. They now announced that they might not make the schedule for the beta release.

April 16th, it is now much easier to use the latest version (nightly builds) in your development project.

April 21st, looks like the team is hunting down some bugs.

Update 2011-05-23

In their most recent blog post the jQuery team announced that beta is soon to be released. The new date is end of May / early June. Major refactoring of navigation and better platform support are the big things they want to get ready before a beta release.

Update 2011-06-22

The long awaited beta 1 release is finally here. It was released two days ago and includes support for more platforms including Blackberry 5 and Opera Mini. Since our team hadn't updated jQM since Alpha 4.1 which was released April 7th there were a lot of improvements and bugfixes. The experience was definitely better regarding floating headers, transitions between pages and navigation in general. We did not encounter any breaking changes that affected our code. Well there were some but they had to do with updating jQuery core from 1.5.1 to 1.6.1.

A second beta should be out the door within a month and 1.0 should be released late this summer.

Now I really think jQuery Mobile is production ready. I really can't see any other alternatives with such a broad device/desktop reach.

Answer 1

the final update

jQuery Mobile Framework has gone a long way. It's obviously ready for production environments. Most notably, performance and size issues have been resolved.

Still not a good choice if you only want to get the 'looks' and ignore what framework does. Then it's just a waste of bandwidth, because you can get all the shiny buttons from just CSS, without 100k of JS framework code

yet another update

JQMbeta2 is great. I suppose you can safely use it and later update to the full 1.0 with minor changes in your code.

update

In my humble opinion you can already try to use JQMalpha4.1 for production (I do) but beta release will differ for sure. (I'll have to make some changes in my code)

Beta release will surely be ready to use for production. No doubt. :)

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You can use it "as is" as long as you can provide devices for testing your app, because there are a lot of issues you might need to work around. But as long as it's tested and working - you have a good app.

The problem with production is that jQuery Mobile might still change the api and names and how stuff work so if you create an app now, it might not work with future releases.

Therefore this depends on your app a lot. If you are planning on using JQM for enhancing semantic HTML and not write lots of JS and CSS hacks, then you can risk starting the project with alpha3 IMHO.

Remember to get the latest version from repository and test if newer versions still work with your code from time to time. It's the bugfixes that you need the most.

Answer 2

In developing a client site with it, the answer is a solid "maybe". It does a lot of things right, and Alpha 3 is a huge improvement, but there are definitely bugs and missing features that make it difficult to work with and make some interactions currently impossible.

It's a great project, and has a ton of potential, but I'd carefully judge your client's needs. If the current limitations are not show-stoppers, it's tons of fun to use and greatly accelerates mobile development.