So I am feeling a little behind in the trends when it comes to Javascript toolkits right now.

In the last few days I have been asked like 5 times if I am familiar with jQuery and I had to say no. I’m not sure why I haven’t taken some time out to check out the likes of JQuery, MooTools, etc….Probably because I have used a small handfull of toolkits over the last few years and I have come to realize that even though most frameworks have good and bad parts, their general approach to creating nice convenient cross browser coding solutions are pretty similar.

But not to be out of touch, I took it upon myself to read up on jQuery over the weekend. It took me a couple minutes to digest what jQuery was doing, but once it sunk in, it hit me like a ton of bricks. No wonder everyone is using jQuery!

What makes it so different is they take a query approach to writing JS. They have one utility function that does all the heavy lifting of finding and objects in the dom, and then wrapping them in functionality. They call it the jQuery function. With this one function, you can specify dom elements, element id’s, classes, even css type selection, to be wrapped in functionality.

For example. If you want to grab every p element on the page and change it’s font size, you can do:

$("p").css("font-size", "160%");

The $() by the way is the jQuery function.

Now compare that to the regular JS way of doing it:


var pHolder = document.getElementsByTagName("p");
for (var i=0; i<pHolder.length; i++) {
pHolder[i].style.fontSize = "120%";
}


Yea, id rather write that tiny piece of jQuery code too.

So not only does jQuery reduce the amount of coding needed, it has a tiny footprint and it’s UI widget ad-ons are pretty slick and all modular, so you can include only the pieces of functionality you want.

I guess it is good I looked into jQuery, because I am sure it will quickly become my toolkit of choice.

Here is an example of what 6 lines or so of code can do in jQuery… use the slider to change the font size in the p elements…
Font Slider Demo