Sunday, August 21, 2011

An brief intro to jQuery

By Chris Gilchrist


jQuery is a cross browser JavaScript library which was designed in order to simplify scripting of JavaScript in HTML. Since its creation in the middle of the 3rd quarter in 2006 it has quickly become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries available with an estimated 47% of the most popular 10,000 websites implements it and an estimated 24.3 million sites on the rest of the web using it.

jQuery is an open source library which is licenced under the MIT and GNU General Public licences and is free to use. jQuery's strapline is "Write less, do more" which it lives up to. jQuery's syntax is intended to simplify and help in the construction of complex JavaScript code. It can also help reduce the need for numerous lines of code in the same function.

The jQuery library includes functions to assist in the manufacture of animations, transition effects and CSS manipulations and also create event handlers and help in DOM traversal and manipulation.

One of the fundamental features of jQuery is its extensibility. Its architecture enables programmers and developers to produce their own plugins for the jQuery library to increase its functionality. These plugins can span from event timers to complicated drag and drop functions enabling far more functionality to be incorporated into the website design.

Another of jQuery's features is the ability to simplify the creation and execution of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) events to one function with parameters rather than the multiple lines of code once needed to create these functions.

One of the more important extensions of jQuery is the jQuery User Interface (UI) which provides advanced effects, widgets and animations, most of which are theme-able. These widgets include form sliding fields, progress bars and date pickers. The project website also provides the ability to create your own theme for the widgets, or choose a predefined one.

With its ease to implement, extensibility and the important features already provided it's evident that jQuery will be with us for the foreseeable future and may one day even be able to entirely replace current technologies such as Flash by Adobe.




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