JQuery_ Novice to Ninja - Earle Castledine [7]
Widespread Adoption
If you care to put every JavaScript library you can think of into Google Trends, you’ll witness jQuery’s exponential rise to superstardom. It’s good to be in the in crowd when it comes to libraries, as popularity equates to more active code development and plenty of interesting third-party goodies.
Countless big players on the Web are jumping on the jQuery bandwagon: IBM, Netflix, Google (which both uses and hosts the jQuery library), and even Microsoft, which now includes jQuery with its MVC framework. With such a vast range of large companies on side, it’s a safe bet that jQuery will be around for some time to come—so the time and effort you invest in learning it will be well worth your while!
jQuery’s popularity has also spawned a large and generous community that’s surprisingly helpful. No matter what your level of skill, you’ll find other developers patient enough to help you out and work through any issues you have. This caring and sharing spirit has also spread out to the wider Internet, blossoming into an encyclopedia of high quality tutorials, blog posts, and documentation.
What’s the downside?
There barely is a downside! The main arguments against using any JavaScript library have always been speed and size: some say that using a library adds too much download bloat to pages, while others claim that libraries perform poorly compared with leaner custom code. Though these arguments are worth considering, their relevance is quickly fading.
First, as far as size is concerned, jQuery is lightweight. The core jQuery library has always had a fairly small footprint—about 19KB for the basics, less than your average JPG image. Any extras your project needs (such as plugins or components from the jQuery UI library) can be added in a modular fashion—so you can easily count your bandwidth calories.
Speed (like size) is becoming a decreasing concern as computer hardware specifications rise and browsers’ JavaScript engines grow faster and faster. Of course, this is far from implying that jQuery is slow—the jQuery team seem to be obsessed with speed! Every new release is faster than the last, so any benefit you might derive from rolling your own JavaScript is shrinking every day.
When it comes to competing JavaScript libraries (and there are more than a handful out there), jQuery is the best at doing what jQuery does: manipulating the DOM, adding effects, and making Ajax requests. Still, many of the libraries out there are of excellent quality and excel in other areas, such as complex class-based programming. It’s always worth looking at the alternatives, but if the reasons we’ve outlined appeal to you, jQuery is probably the way to go.
But enough talk: time for jQuery to put its money where its mouth is!
Downloading and Including jQuery
Before you can fall in love with jQuery (or at least, judge it for yourself) you need to obtain the latest version of the code and add it to your web pages. There are a few ways to do this, each with a couple of options available. Whatever you choose, you’ll need to include jQuery in your HTML page, just as you would any other JavaScript source file.
Tip: It’s Just JavaScript!
Never forget that jQuery is just JavaScript! It may look and act superficially different—but underneath it’s written in JavaScript, and consequently it’s unable to do anything that plain old JavaScript can’t. This means we’ll include it in our pages the same way we would any other JavaScript file.
Downloading jQuery
This is the most common method of acquiring the jQuery library—just download it! The latest version is always available from the jQuery web site. The big shiny download button will lead us to the Google code repository, where we can grab the latest “production compression level” version.
Click the download link and save the JavaScript file to a new working folder, ready for playing with. You’ll need to