What is jQuery?

First, jQuery is awesome.  But what is it?  jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animation, and Ajax interactions.  What does that mean?  It means that the user interface of your web application can now be both beautiful and functional at the same time.

jQuery allows us to quickly and easily change things on a web page after it’s loaded in the client’s browser in response to user actions.  It includes animation support so you can do things like fade in a portion of the page that is normally hidden.  With the built in Ajax capabilities, developers can easily call the server from the page itself to do things like populate auto-complete and auto-suggest boxes.  Ajax can also be used to save user input from the page without submitting a form.  In short, jQuery expands the options developers have at their disposal when building web based user interfaces.

Additionally, jQuery library takes care of how different browsers treat the same JavaScript code.  When we write jQuery code in our web application, we don’t have to worry about it behaving differently on Firefox and Internet Explorer or on different versions of the same browser.  jQuery takes care of those differences for us and just does the right thing.

For more information about jQuery, visit the jQuery site.

At Fieldstone Software, we regularly use jQuery in our web application projects.  To see samples of our work, check out our portfolio.  If you have questions, please contact us.