Whilst looking into new techniques and reading tutorials I came across some useful Javascript frameworks, specifically, jQuery, which caught my attention immediately.

Why did i pick jQuery?

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

There are a few reasons why jQuery caught my eye:

• Easy to understand and pick up/learn.
• Minimalistic in size and functions.
• Great documentation (and examples).
• Plugins archive to die for.

Easy to understand and pick up/learn.

When comparing jQuery to the other frameworks (such as prototype/scriptaculous/ext). I found jQuery very easy to understand, it has great documentation on every function and the function names relate to what they are actually doing.

An Example:

$("p.surprise").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");

This would change the paragraph html element with class=suprise to class=”surpise ohmy”.

If there were any height, width, opacity differences, it would alter them slowly.

Not only are the functions incredibly easy to understand and learn, but they implement well together.

Minimalistic in size and functions.

When you download jQuery (1.2.1), you have 3 download options:

• jQuery for production use @ 14Kb (Minified and gzipped)
• jQuery for development and testing @ 77Kb (Uncompressed)
• jQuery for non-gzip users @ 26Kb (Packed)

For the first option, it would take a standard user less than a second to load the jQuery library when visiting your site, even if they were 56K it would only take around 2.8 seconds, which is not bad considering it takes alot longer to load the average image.

Great documentation (and examples)

When i first starting learning and trying to understand jQuery, the functions and methods of using them were not sticking in my head, so I frequently had the jQuery API Documentation open which has great tutorials, examples and demonstrations to help you understand where you are going wrong and how certain features are supposed to operate.

Plugins archive to die for

At my last count, the jQuery Plugins directory had just over 500 plugins in 20 categories. Not only that, but each one of the plugins comes unpacked meaning you can edit the code to suit your needs.

This was the best feature i probably found because i could see how other users had implemented jQuery to their own requirements and i could also take a look at their code to understand the jQuery framework further.