I participated as a judge for Packt Publishing’s open source JavaScript libraries award. Today, they’ve announced the winner: jQuery. Open source JavaScript is stronger than ever, and all of the entrants in the award have made great strides in the past year. Runners-up Raphaël and Mootools deserve great praise for the work they’ve put into both their products and community.

Packt’s press release is below and includes a quote from this blogger.

jQuery wins the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award

Birmingham, UK. 18 November 2010

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that jQuery has won the inaugural Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Award is a new category introduced to the Open Source Awards this year, featuring libraries of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), visually enhanced applications or smoother server-side JavaScript functionalities.

"On behalf of the entire jQuery Team, let me first say thanks to Packt Publishing for this award.

I'd also like to give a huge thanks to the community of designers and developers that use jQuery daily and felt the urge to vote for jQuery as their favorite JavaScript library. We'll use this prize to further the development of the jQuery Project." Said Ralph Whitbeck, jQuery core team member.

“While jQuery hasn't undergone any radical change in the past year, the project has continued to evolve at the same frenetic pace and the 1.4 release included a wide range of small but important improvements.” Added Michael Mahemoff, Google developer advocate, HTML5/JavaScript specialist and one of the judges for the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category. “jQuery covers all bases as its performance is high priority, it is easy to use, has a huge community, great documentation, and an excellent plugin ecosystem.”

While jQuery occupied the top spot in the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category, the other two extremely popular finalists Raphaël and Mootools tied and both projects will be awarded the first runner up position.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has two more categories left, including the Open Source CMS category, for which results will be announced November 19th.</blockquote>