Ajax Girl

John Resig and team have released jQuery 1.1 which includes a speed upgrade, an updated API, a new homepage, and new documentation including a book in the works.

The community seems to be growing from strength to strength.

New Features

• By all of our counts, jQuery 1.1’s selectors are 10x-20x faster than those in jQuery 1.0.4. This should provide a noticable difference in your jQuery applications.
• Common selectors like div#id, div .class, td:nth-child(1), and div > div are all significantly faster. It’s a complete world of difference. Try them out and you’ll see.
• You can now pass in a function as a value for an attribute or a css property. The function is executed and its return value is set as the value for the property. For example:

  // 1.0 Code
  $(\"a\").each(function(){
      $(this).attr(\"href\", \"/item/\" + this.id);
  }).show();
  
  // 1.1 Code
  $(\"a\").attr(\"href\", function(){ return \"/item/\" + this.id; }).show();

• You can now unbind an event handler from within itself. This allows you to have event handlers that are only bound for a specific number of executions, for example:

  $(\"button\").click(function(e){
      // Unbind the event handler if a specific form is hidden
      if ( $(\"#submitForm\").is(\":hidden\") ) {
          $(this).unbind( e );
      }
  });

• Easily bind an event that will only occur once (this replaces the old .oneclick() functionality):

  // Show a thank you message for a form submission, but only once
  $(\"form\").one(\"submit\",function(){
      $(\"#thankyou\").show();
  });

• You can now set the text value of an element (this is different from .html(), where in .text() all HTML is displayed as text).

  $(\"pre\").text(\"<b>Hello</b>, how are you?\");
  
  // Result:
  <pre>&lt;b&gt;Hello&lt;/b&gt;, how are you?</pre>

• You can now build your own filters, using a custom function. (This was in 1.0, but it wasn’t documented very well.)

  // Find all divs whose parent isn't hidden
  $(\"div\").filter(function(){
    return $(this).parent(\":hidden\").length > 0;
  });

• You can now pass a comma-separated list of selectors to the following filter functions:
  filter, find, not, siblings, parents, children, next, prev. This allows you to do some very cool stuff:

  // Find all radio buttons, or checkboxes, in a form
  $(\"form input\").filter(\":radio, :checkbox\");
  
  // Find the next element that's a span, or a div
  $(this).next(\"span, div\");

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquery-11-is-reborn-on-its-first-birthday