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jQuery makes AJAX/AHAH almost too easy…

July 8, 2007 on 8:08 am | In General | 2 Comments

While wandering aimlessly around the net recently i came across several references to something called jQuery. At first i ignored it because i thought (based on the name) that it was an SQL library for use in Java-based web applications. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and i visited it:

http://jquery.com/

And i could say nothing but WOW!!! jQuery is a fairly small JavaScript library which makes writing basic AJAX/AHAH functionality so simple that even script-kiddies can quickly add interesting AJAX-style behaviours to their sites. And powerful! Finding and walking over DOM elements has never been easier, nor has DOM event handling.

While i did take a look at the Dojo JavaScript framework some months ago, and found parts of it to be quite revolutionary, i was disappointed at how much JS code my AJAX apps had to download on each page hit. jQuery has Dojo beat hands-down when it comes to size. Dojo has every feature in the book and has a huge set of JS files which must be downloaded by client AJAX pages. jQuery, on the other hand, provides a relatively slim library (version 1.1.3 is about 21k “compressed” and 62k in “human readable” form), and authors write plugins to provide the missing features (e.g. fancy GUI effects).

i despise making heavy use of JS in my web pages, because i want to support older browsers, but i’ve got a couple of prototype applications which could certainly benefit from AJAX interfaces, and jQuery makes that simpler than ever before.

If you’re a JS coder, i highly recommend taking a look at jQuery!