However, there’s a distinct point of failure of jQuery UI – ThemeRoller. ThemeRoller is the tool that’s used to create a jQuery UI theme – without a theme, there’s a lot less to love about jQuery UI. None of the widgets and CSS styling are available (interactions and effects would still be available, though). This past week, though, ThemeRoller was down. Specifically, it was not outputting custom themes, though the default ones were working. It was down for about three days, to be exact. This was a very big deal to me (amongst others, I’m certain) – I had to delay a production release because I couldn’t get a custom theme that I needed at the time.

There are a lot of reasons that ThemeRoller would be down, and it’s understandable that it will probably break at times as updates are made to it. The bad thing is that if ThemeRoller goes down, for whatever reason, there is no alternative available to create themes with. What I would like to see happen is there be established an alternate home for ThemeRoller. In addition, it should have an archive of all production versions of ThemeRoller. That way, if a bum version gets released for a few days, one can always use the previous version, which should work fine.

With these fairly trivial changes, jQuery UI would eliminate a point of failure. What could possibly be better than that?