My Introduction to jQuery

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Chris Missal, June 04, 2008

I've recently jumped on board with John Resig and his jQuery team. I guess I haven't really "jumped on board". I've just really gotten interested in the library. If you're not familiar with jQuery and you do some JavaScripting, I seriously recommend checking it out. I'm still getting a grasp on it and learning its capabilities, but so far I've decided that it is, in fact, awesome!

I have yet to explore all the add-ons that others have developed as extensions of the jQuery core, but for my types of uses, I may not need to for quite some time. One project I was presented with over a year ago required me to be able to dynamically add form fields. We didn't want to start with 15 fields, but we did want the user to be able to use all of them if needed. I was having troubles coding this in JavaScript and keeping it cross-browser compliant. It was not just un-compliant, but "un-working"; I ended up using Ajax to reload the form controls from the server.

With jQuery on my side, I could have coded this in just a few lines. What was I thinking?!

Version 1.2.6 of jQuery was released on May 24th, 2008 and includes a number of improvements on the speed of core functions. For some of these impressive numbers (Note: 100% faster is the same as "takes half the time"), check out the jQuery blog for a word or two on the release.

A final word: This will let you know how pumped I am to get in there and start playing around. I have an excellent idea for a plugin I'll be creating. If I can get going on this... it will be sweet!

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Filed Under: JavaScript