If you work in web development and need to pull off some nifty web 2.0 features like CSS manipulation and AJAX, I can’t recommend the jQuery library enough. I originally heard about it from Alex King’s blog and was inspired to try it out. I love when new libraries and frameworks have nice tutorials and after reading a few of the jQuery tutorials, I felt I had the gist enough to start playing with it.
My first usage was on my Quick Post WordPress plugin. I basically implemented code directly from a few tutorials to add the tabs along the top and the image previews. It proved to work flawlessly with very little tweaking.
My second project was a little more ambitious. A friend asked me to help with a search feature for his site administrators. By selecting options from five different drop down boxes, properties would be filtered until the site administrator found the ones they were looking for. Because this was for a friend, I decided to take my time and write it using jQuery and AJAX, just to learn it and see how it worked. I was therefore surprised when after 3 hours of effort, I had my web page passing the drop down options via HTTPRequest to a PHP page that queried the MySQL database and returned the proper result formatted in HTML. Further, using the power of jQuery Chainability – the magic of jQuery, I was able to make the results fade out and fade in as they were being uploaded.
The syntax used takes a little to get used to as it’s a hybrid of core object oriented programming, Ruby for example, combined with the formatting of JavaScript code. However, once you have it down, it is a breeze to interact with the document object model and manipulate anything on the page.
If you have examples of jQuery in action, please post your links below.