jQuery is one of those frameworks that has a tremendous following but it is a pretty sizeable framework. Obviously this has it's downsides when doing mobile development as the capabilities between desktop and mobile do differ somewhat. To some degree you can control what gets included in the jQuery file but there was never a predefined set aimed specifically at mobile devices.
The developers of jQuery first branched into jQuery UI for performing JavaScript based UI controls and animations in a similar way to what Scriptaculous is for Prototype. Now the developers have moved on to the next logical step and have developed a mobile version of their framework. At the time of writing it's not yet been released but it does sound promising and I can't wait to try it.
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.
They're also quite keen on getting it to be compatible with as many mobile platforms as they can and covering as many different mobile browsers and versions as well. To demonstrate what the mobile framework should work with they have produced a table of compatibility showing graded browser support. The supported mobile platforms are:
- iOS
- Blackberry OS
- Windows Phone
- Android
- Bada
- Symbian
- WebOS
- Maemo
- MeeGo
