Regular readers of this blog will know that I am great fan of jQuery. Recently I am thinking of evangelizing jQuery at work and convince people who take up decision to make jQuery as the default JavaScript framework to be used across the organization.
The following is the list of advantages/benefits which I have prepared so far.
- Light weight and has a very small footprint.
- Browser abstraction – jQuery provides browser abstraction and is hightly optimized for each individual browser.
- Excellent Plugin architecture – jQuery has an excellent Plugin architecture and you can find a jQuery Plugin for anything that you want to do.
- Speed – When compared with other libraries, jQuery is much faster.
- Less code == Less mistakes == better performance.
- Active development community – It has a very active development community headed by John Resig
- Backed by major organizations like Microsoft and Nokia. Microsoft had integrated it with the latest version of ASP.NET
- Very small learning curve.
- Chaining well suited for designers since it uses selectors based on CSS Selectors.
- Excellent Documentation for all methods and selectors.
- jQuery UI – Provides ready made themable GUI components.
Let me know if you could think of any addition to this list. Thanks 🙂
Here is my list…
* Its open source and the project is licensed under a MIT and GPL license. Its free yo, in multiple ways!
* Its small, 18kb minified and Gzipped (114kb, Uncompressed)
* Its incredibly popular, which is to say it has a large community of users and healthy amount of contributors who participate as developers and evangelist
* Its intentionally a lightweight footprint with a simple but yet clever plugin architecture
* Its repository of plugins (http://plugins.jquery.com/) is vast and has seen steady growth since jQuery’s release
* Its API is fully documented, including inline code examples, which in the world of JavaScript libraries is a luxury. Heck any documentation at all was a luxury for years.
* Its friendly, which is to say it won’t break down on you and won’t break other javascript solutions you may use
* Its community support is actually fairly useful, including several mailing lists, an IRC Channel, and a freakishly insane amount of tutorials, articles, and BLOG post from the jQuery community
* Its openly developed, which means anyone can contribute bugs, fixes, and development help
* Its development is steady and consistent, which is to say the development team is not afraid of releasing updates
* Its adoption by large organization has and will continue to breed longevity and stability (e.g. Microsoft, Dell, Bank of America, Digg, CBS, NetFlix)
* It’s incorporating specifications from the W3C before the browsers do. As an example jQuery supports a good majority of the CSS 3 selectors.
* Its currently tested and optimized for development on modern browsers (Chrome 1, Chrome Nightly, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8rc1, Opera 9.6, Safari 3.2, WebKit Nightly, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Firefox Nightly)
* Its darn right powerful in the hands of designer types as well as programmers. jQuery does not discriminate
* Its elegance, methodologies, and philosophy of changing the way we write javascript is becoming a standard in and of itself
* Its unexplainable by product of feel good programming is contagious and certainly unavoidable, even the critics seem to fall in love with aspects of jQuery
* Its documentation has many outlets (e.g. api browser, dashboard apps, cheatsheets) including an offline API browser (AIR application).
* Its purposely bent to facilitate unobtrusive javascript practices
* Its remained a JavaScript library (as opposed to a framework) at heart while at the same time providing a sister project for user interface widgets and application development. (jQuery UI)
* Its learning curve is approachable because it builds upon concepts that most developers and designer already understand (e.g. CSS, (x)HTML)
@Cody,
Wow!!! That’s a huge list. Thanks for writing it out. I guess this should be enough to convince anyone to use jQuery. 🙂
Hi,
jQuery is nice stuff for building simple client side application, but it is highly dangerous for building secured application, if jQuery has any security hole your application will be hacked.
Thanks for sharing your view. But I don’t agree that jQuery cannot be used for building secure applicaitons.
First, every version of jQuery (before it is released) is tested using a test-suite and if there are any security holes they will be captured there.
Even if a security hole is detected in jQuery, there is a huge community and a fix will be provided with a matter of hours if not days. But on the other hand if you are using a custom library and a security hole is detected then it may take quite some time before it is fixed.
Sudar,
I will soon be going to our legal group to get permission to use JQuery on our very large ecommerce site. The issue of security will be raised. Is there a list of security holes found and patches released? I would like to show the speed at which the community releases patches.
I am relatively new to jquery and would like to use it in place of our heavy custom code.
thank you
Gary
Gary,
Check this link http://bugs.jquery.com/ticketgraph
Thanks Sudar,
I’ll add this to my list of resources.. to show how active JQuery development/bug fixing is. Wish me luck! I need to get JQuery approved by our info security group. Fortunately I haven’t found any holes in JQuery that aren’t in Javascript itself.
-Gary
Very nice Sudar. Thanks for sharing !!!