JQuery

I'm pretty much in love with JQuery at the moment.

The last time I had to do anything complex with JavaScript, I inherited a dropdown menu system with some animation that was using 7500 lines of script pushed to the client's browser.  I was able to replace it with 20-30 lines, including hacks for IE6, and it only took two days to tinker to be just so.  I was really proud of that.

Fast forward a bit, and bring JavaScript frameworks into the picture.  In a nutshell, they're libraries of JavaScript code that allow you to do two things:

  1. Not worry about cross-browser compatibility issues.  They will run in IE 6/7/8, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
  2. Do really cool things with almost no effort.
JQuery is the most common, from my point of view.  Others that have been recommended to me include Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Dojo, Prototype, and Yahoo User Interface (YUI).  They all will get the job done; licensing, familiarity, or one killer widget may make the decision for you.

Anyways, the rewrite of that menu bar gets really easy when there are twenty or thirty available plugins for JQuery to do this.  The built-in tooltip/alt-text hover in IE6 only hovers for 5 seconds; now, we can easily make it persist indefinitely.  Expanding and collapsing parts of an online form also become much easier.

If it's at all interesting, here's a quick tutorial.

All in all, full of win.

1 comment:

WineGoddess said...

Check out MooTools as well. :) http://mootools.net/