JQuery: JavaScript Library of the Future

I write mostly PHP and Javascript at work. Given the choice of 1) creating an app in PHP, or 2) creating a simple PHP back end to, for example, add or delete a resource, and creating all the interaction in HTML/Javascript, I always go with #2.

That's because jQuery makes Javascript and Ajax so easy. PHP is painful by comparison. (Of course, many people say PHP is painful inherently...)

More importantly, jQuery is much much faster and less error-prone to develop with that Javascript alone.

The last small app I wrote in Rails, http://glunote.com, I switched from the standard Prototype/Scriptaculous libraries to JQuery, just to give it a spin. Took about 5 minutes to install the JQuery plugin (JRails) and tweek a few things to get it up and running. Man, was I impressed. Not that glunote does anything super tricky AJAX wise, but I still found JQuery so much easier to use than prototype.

It's got a really shallow learning curve, it integrates well with existing Rails RJS and helper functions (thanks to jRails), has a ton of plugins and is pretty lightweight for a JS library. I'll be using it for all future projects.

These kinds of slide presentations just don't make a whole lot of sense without accompanying audio.

jQuery is the library of the present. LOVE it.

It's made me look forward to writing JS in my projects, and that's saying something.