jQuery for you and me. Ab-sol-u-tiv-e-leeee.

Everyone who knows me knows why I'm a fan of jQuery (clear separation of concerns and CSS-style selectors), but jQuery 1.4 builds on one of the best javascript libraries to make it even better.

The new release not only brings with it the standard maintanence type stuff such as better performace and a couple of new functions, but some good enhancements across the library.

You can now bind multiple event handlers at once, so instead of chaining a load of binding methods together, you can pop them all into the same call, like so:

$('#myClass').bind({
mouseover: function() {
// do something on a mouseover
},
mouseout: function() {
// do something on a mouseout
}
});

The new.detach() method allows you to remove elements from the DOM. It works exactly the same way as the.remove() method but unlike.remove() it doesn't destroy any data held by jQuery on that element (including any event handlers added by jQuery).

This can be useful when you want to remove an element, but you know you'll need it again later on, so you can write code like:

var myClass = $('#myClass');

// Bind an event handler
myClass.click(function(){
alert('Hello World!');
});

myClass.detach(); // Remove it from the DOM

// … do stuff here as if the item no longer exists.

myClass.appendTo('body'); // Bolt it back on to the DOM
myClass.click(); // alerts "Hello World!"

As far as DOM traversal goes, there is a new .unwrap() method which does the opposite as 1.3's .wrap() method, you can now query the DOM to check if an element .has() sub elements and also there is a new .until() method for limiting traversal of the DOM tree.

There's a new .delay() function for the queue, so you can get your animations the way you want them and you can now deal with JSON encoded attributes, so you can build up jQuery objects without needing to go through the process of adding .attr() to everything.

$('<div>', {
id: 'myClass',
css: {
fontSize: 20,
color: 'red'
},
click: function(){
alert('myClass has been clicked!');
}
}).text('Click Me!');

Last (and probably least) there are new .focusIn() and .focusOut() events which allow you to take action when an element, or a descendant of an element, gains or loses focus, so writing watermarked text boxes should be (only fractionally) easier :-)

For further information you can, RTFM here! :-). Also there is an 14 day long online event going on here that will get you up to speed with the changes.

Yum.