The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity. Clearly there are many cases where it is very useful, but sometimes people seem to use it for no real reason too. Compressed jQuery is 29kb — a good bit smaller than most images — and if served from a CDN (see docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery) then it is very well cache-able. Rebecca Murphey has a great write-up of her own switch to Dojo from jQuery – the blog post is more about why not jQuery versus why Dojo. That article is basically a very detailed answer to this very question. Had it been available when I was writing the answer below – I would have definitely quoted it.
JQuery also provides a paradigm for event handling that goes beyond basic DOM element selection and manipulation. The event assignment and the event callback function definition are done in a single step in a single location in the code. JQuery also aims to incorporate other highly used https://www.globalcloudteam.com/tech/jquery/ JavaScript functionality (e.g. fade ins and fade outs when hiding elements, animations by manipulating CSS properties). It helps web developers to add extra functionalities to their websites. It is the most popular JavaScript library used to traverse and manipulate the HTML DOM tree.
jQuery References
Some of those points remind me of how I thought of these frameworks 5 years ago when they were still young. For the most part unless filesize or IP is really a concern, I’d say they’re doing themselves a grave disservice. QUnit is a test automation framework used to test the jQuery project. The jQuery team developed it as an in-house unit testing library. The jQuery team uses it to test its code and plugins, but it can test any generic JavaScript code, including server-side JavaScript code.
JQuery’s syntax is designed to make it easier to navigate a document, select DOM elements, create animations, handle events, and develop Ajax applications. JQuery also provides capabilities for developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. This enables developers to create abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, theme-able widgets. The modular approach to the jQuery library allows the creation of powerful dynamic web pages and Web applications. The most critical disadvantage of jQuery is that it is a huge library to import. JQuery is a single JS file which contains all its DOM, events, effects, and AJAX components.
jQuery Effects
I think many programmers don’t know pure JavaScript syntax unlike jQuery and thus they make common mistakes. In order to create these plug-ins, developers can either choose to write their own code from scratch or build on top of an existing structure such as the jQuery Boilerplate. It is possible to make Ajax requests (with cross-browser support) with $.ajax() to load and manipulate remote data. This line finds all div elements with class attribute test , then registers an event handler on each element for the «click» event, then adds the class attribute foo to each element.
Plus, jQuery is just way simpler than most web frameworks, and doesn’t require you to rethink the way you code things. Since jQuery wraps around native Javascript functions, it will always be less performant than using vanilla JS, with the tradeoff being that it speeds up development time. JQuery is still very fast, but you’ll want to watch for unoptimized code. Having too many laggy function calls can drop your app’s framerate below the refresh rate, which will feel like janky microstuttering to the end user, or just straight up lag. Of course, this isn’t the only way to select elements; jQuery can use nearly any CSS selector, all packaged in its $function.
Your Answer
Since the HTML DOM is always present, there’s no more worrying about browser settings either. Based on the manipulation of the HTML DOM and designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML, jQuery incorporates parts of HTML and CSS. Thousands of companies are on the jQuery bandwagon, and your company should be, too. From the above example, you can notice that the JavaScript code is lengthier and complicated than the jQuery code. Both the code are performing the same work of changing the background color but jQuery takes less code. You can work around other examples, which indicates that jQuery minimizes the code and is less complicated to use.
- I think many programmers don’t know pure JavaScript syntax unlike jQuery and thus they make common mistakes.
- JQuery now offers a ‘slim’ version without these features, which saves about 6kb when using the gzipped and minified file.
- One example that really shows the value in having these plugins is when a design requires a carousel.
- The jQuery library could be on your web server or a publicly accessible content delivery network .
- This is hardly a «technical reason» to be added to the list but may be interesting nonetheless and may actually be the most common reaction.
- Google and other search engines using page load time as one of the many factors affecting SEO.
Front-end web programmers who are excited about working with new and legacy systems will have no problem finding positions utilizing their jQuery knowledge. It’s a good bet that pre-2015 infrastructures function over a jQuery-based framework. For the sake of speed and efficiency, companies today are rebasing their applications, incorporating more advanced technologies. Time and money play a huge role in that process; the biggest issue there being the development teams are typically given little of both for the project.
jQuery, What is It and Should You Use It?
For internal company sites, admin panels, or anything that isn’t end-user facing, you shouldn’t worry about including it. Using $ improves the performance, as the class/whatever attribute you are using to search, need not to be searched for multiple times in the entire webpage content. Another drawback is that jQuery’s abstraction hides the complex parts of JavaScript, making learning JavaScript much more difficult.
This allows for a more «application-like» experience for the user. Many see it as a bad idea to make a web page which depends on JavaScript, and won’t run without it, and insist that JavaScript should only enhance the user experience. However, websites which won’t work without JavaScript do exist and are becoming more common. JQuery is a software library, written https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ in JavaScript, whose intention is to help JavaScript developers when writing code that is to be run in a web page. Use jQuery when it will significantly reduce your development time, and you can afford the extra overhead of downloading the library. One example that really shows the value in having these plugins is when a design requires a carousel.
Here are 6 reasons why we still use jQuery at Atypic:
Maybe you work in a team where frontend developers are not all JavaScript wizards and they are more used to jQuery than with newer standards. You might also buy ready-made templates that just use it and its plugins. A lot of people automatically include jQuery without considering the fact that it might not make the particular development task at hand much easier. Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Of course, we should not conclude this post without discussing some shortcomings of jQuery. When creating complicated web components or single page apps, managing all the moving parts via the DOM will start to get cumbersome in jQuery, and will lead to some colossal script files. Many JavaScript frameworks have risen to prominence in the last decade to address this problem, such as React and VueJS. These frameworks update the DOM based on changes in your state/data which mostly negate the need for jQuery’s powerful DOM manipulation. This prevents jQuery from running multiple searches every time you use the $()syntax to find an element. The $in front of the variable is convention for naming jQuery object variables, and isn’t required.
How To Use jQuery in WordPress
The jquery handle has been assigned to the jQuery library on the Cloudflare CDN and it remains a dependency for the local my_script. You can use the same approach to pull other jQuery components — like jQuery-UI — from a CDN. It would be hard to overstate the impact jQuery had on web development after the open-source JavaScript library was released more than 15 years ago. It might invoke the selector functionality, it depends what arguments you pass it. It is lightweight and helps when we have to write less and do more. There are two ways to include jQuery in a project, which is to download a local copy or link to a file via Content Delivery Network .