jQuery Brilliance
Over the past year I have been writing more and more javascript. This element can give your website real power. The only problem is that javascript can be at times cumbersome to write. This is when I decided to start searching for javascript libraries to include into my code to take a lot of the heavy lifting out of my javascript development.
Enter prototype, a javascript framework to do exactly what I wanted. Now I had started using this framework for a few months when I came across my first problem. Prototype was good at accessing elements and manipulating them but kinda sucked at generating visual effects such as sliding windows. I didn’t really want to write my own as this would take time, so I started searching. What I found were a few more libraries that hook onto prototype that allow you to do this. Excellent I was now in business. So I’m now happy using prototype and other 3rd party plugins.
Along comes my drupal project that I mentioned in an earlier blog. Drupal already has these really nice javascript elements built into it. I didn’t really pay much attention to them as I just figured that the guys at Drupal had really pushed themselves and come up with the code themselves. This was until I was forced to delve into the javascript code to create a nice javascript effect for myself. This is where I came across jQuery. At this point I was just wondering what this was so I started searching. “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.” is what jQuery’s site says and after using it for a while I would have to agree. Although I did like prototype i did find it a bit buggy at times, jQuery has only proven to be stable whilst also including a great deal more functionality.
Overall I would have to say that jQuery is what it says it is and I now use jQuery in all of my websites as it speeds up my javascript development.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.