jQuery: Awesome

Back in the day, I discovered jQuery, but never really did anything with it. I always wanted to learn, but really never had the time. I do now. Let me tell you something:

jQuery is friggin awesome.

Let me preface with the fact that I know little to no JavaScript. I once wrote one function to add the current date to a textbox in JS and it took me around half the day. However, in that same amount of time about two weeks ago, I was able to nearly completely understand how jQuery works. After a week, I was helping out others with their problems.

Don’t get me wrong, jQuery can’t do everything, but it sure can do some powerful stuff. For instance, AJAX is a breeze. For one project I had to make an AJAX call to check to see if someone was posting a comment as someone else while logged in as themselves, so I had to write my AJAX function myself. It took me 53 lines of JS and maybe 3 days to get it working right (along with a TON of research). When I wanted to apply that same function to my new project, I thought I would give jQuery a chance.

Eight lines of code. Actually, technically one line of code because I broke it into several lines:

function MakeCall(url,doAsync,callback) {
$.ajax({
url: url,
async: doAsync,
dataType: "text",
success: callback
});
}

Of course I have to handle the “callback” in the function that’s calling the MakeCall() function, but the actual making the call has been reduced by 85%. And it’s easier to maintain and reuse! This isn’t all that jQuery is good for. I believe jQuery’s strongest feature is its document manipulation. If you want to change something, all you have to do is select the element or class and, well, change it. For instance, if you have a div with an id of “myDiv”, to change the CSS class on it, you just do:

$("#myDiv").addClass("someClass");

Really, that’s it. If you wanted to do that when something is clicked, you could do:

$("#myLink").click(function () { $("#myDiv").addClass("someClass"); });

No, for real. That’s all you have to do. You can also manipulate things on page load:

$.(document).ready( function () { //run functions here });

The last and I think one of the most important aspects of jQuery is that it is VERY well documented, VERY ardently followed, and VERY well supported. You can even get Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008! I couldn’t possibly go through all the cool stuff that jQuery can do. You’ll have to see for yourself. It truly is amazing, and it is, as I was told, “brain-dead-stupid easy to learn”.