Andrew L. Van Slaars

I’ve worked with quite a few JavaScript libraries over the last couple of years. All of these libraries save a great deal of work and allow you to do pretty amazing stuff, but after a few days of learning and using jQuery… I have to say that it is the most impressive one that I’ve worked with.

jQuery has a code-to-impact ratio similar to regular expressions… lots of power packed into very little code. The big difference (other than purpose) is that unlike regular expressions, jQuery is pretty easy to read and write. The selector syntax makes writing unobtrusive JavaScript a simple task and the number of plug-ins that are available means that most common (and some not-so-common) problems have probably been solved already. All you need to do is download the plug-in and use it on your page. jQuery offers a fluent interface which allows several functions to be run in succession by chaining methods. Condensing 5 function calls into a single line of code not only works, but it is also readable.

As an ASP.NET developer, conflicts with ASP.NET Ajax are a concern, but with jQuery even if there were conflicts (there aren’t any that I’ve encountered yet) with another library, you can call a single method ($.noConflict()) and you have nothing to worry about… they seem to have thought of everything.

It rocks. You should try it. I will write more informative (and more organized) posts on jQuery in the near future… stay tuned.

Andrew Ajax, JavaScript, jQuery Ajax, JavaScript, jQuery