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 Mobi

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I would suggest you have a look at the list of Blockers and Critical on the jQuery Mobile issue tracking system.

Go through those and see whether any of them are possible show stoppers for you.

UPD: I am personally finding that it is not acceptable for the stuff I am working on. We need to use sub-page navigation via hash, i.e. #controller/action/id and there's nothing like that in jQuery mobile. So we had to switch to Sencha Touch, which does brilliant job at that.

Answer 3

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 4

Jquery Mobile the Beta version released last week(June 11) is closest one. If you are not concerned about licensing. Sproutcore and SenchaTouch are other two ones that I like

Answer 5

Considering that the beta 1 took 3 more months than estimate, not the "1 more month", I wouldn't be optimistic about the release schedule. Since we don't know how many betas are actually planned by the team, there's no way to know when it will be ready. But at the rate they are going, it might be unrealistic to assume anytime in 2011 it will be 1.0 ready.