This is actually something I'm interested in, even in working on.

I can note that AJAX and FX are two core parts which could definitely be turned into "recommended" modules that you could optionally eject to get a smaller jQuery bundle if you don't need them.

As well, there are some official plugins like color animation support which could nicely be used as optional modules that could be built into jQuery.

A nice builder could support exporting a single jQuery file with everything inside, a minified version of that, or an archive (zip, .tar.gz, ...) containing individual script files which could be concatenated and minified on the fly by some script ported to different languages.

Why not building jQuery with maven ?

Here is an example of a builder i am working on with David Meunier : http://www.si4g.fr/open4g/

In this project i suggest you to see JSbuilder, a maven Plugin for JS/CSS Importing, Building, Testing and Reporting.

The idea is to build our JavaScript application from many sources (extra libs or personal) as jQuery, jQuery-ui, plugins and many others by importing the sources we want. Then we build and test the application and release it into our repository.

If you are interested by this project you can subscribe to the mailing list here : http://www.si4g.fr/open4g/mail-lists.html

John has addressed this on several occasions, he doesn't really have any plans to break apart the dependencies fully, but he's said that AJAX and fx may come out eventually.

I'll keep this ticket as open, only because he's shown _some_ interest in getting those two parts out.

Related, jQuery is now testable (as of 1.4.3) as individual files in the src directory (no build step needed...)

For posterity's sake, this ticket was originally intended to be a web interface where someone could select the jQuery pieces they wanted and a server-side script would spit out a custom version. I personally would close it because the library landscape (both jQuery and it's "competitors") has changed so dramatically from where we were four years ago. IIRC this ticket was originally inspired by a UI library that had a similar web interface to what I just described.

Because as John's said on numerous occasions that he would prefer not to break apart core and it's dependencies, but also due to 1) jQuery's dependancies being quite tightly coupled right now, 2) the age of this ticket and the fact that at this time, I can't see there being a change in mindset on a web interface based build of jQuery being made available, I think it would be best if we closed this ticket.

If it's the case that enough of the community request this type of build during the roadmap and feature discussions, I'm sure some additional consideration will be given to it, but I think this decision will probably revolve around a much larger future discussion if John does decide to go down that path with it.