Javascript Library – JQuery

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, September 3, 2006 @ 11:23 am

After the big food fight between JQuery and Prototype, I decided to check out the new release of JQuery, a JavaScript library that makes it easy to manipulate the DOM and perform basic Ajax operations. Now I'm hooked. Sure there's an overlap between it and Prototype, but JQuery's focus seems to be on ease-of-use for the developer. It plays well with other JavaScript code and libraries, and you can write code like this:

$("p[a]").addClass("interesting");

Which finds all paragraphs that contain a link and adds the "interesting" CSS class to them. The library's intent is very similar to that of prototype, and the competition has spawned the aforementioned sniping, but that competition has also been good for prototype. Witness all the new syntactic sugar and the efforts to make prototype play nicer with other code. Hopefully, the developers of Prototype will follow JQuery's lead and pull together all the disparate documentation into a single, friendly and accessible source.

One other thing that the recent wrangling brought out, is that Prototype appears to be one of those slightly dysfunctional open source projects, where the original creator hasn't done enough to engage the community or to delegate project responsibilities to other volunteers. As a result, there seems to be a fair amount of user dissatisfaction unrelated to the technical merits of the framework. This dissatisfaction and JQuery's explicit efforts to be developer friendly, may be be what is driving a lot of former Prototype developers into the arms of JQuery. This sort of dysfunction isn't necessarily fatal to an open-source project, and I'm sure it will get fixed over time.

 
  Technorati : ajax, javascript, jquery, prototype

Related posts:

1. jQuery vs. Prototype: OO JavaScript with or without training wheels
2. Ajax/Javascript Library – DHTMLGoodies
3. JRails: Scriptaculous on top of JQuery
4. Pimp my jQuery: Five plugins to replace the features Prototype and Scriptaculous users expect
5. Javascript Library – JSGraphics

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