twitter feed
5 Reasons why jQuery is awesome
Since the beginning of the Internet, web developers have tried all sorts of different things to add interactivity to their websites. Flash & Silverlight led to slow loading pages, browser plugins and the dreaded broken image icon for those users who didn’t have it. Driven mostly by creative agencies, these client-size applications gave us dazzling animations but also new terms such as ‘mysetery meat navigations' that reguarly caused users to get lost in sites.
Of all the client-side tools, Javascript had always been around, but for a long time lost favour due to everyones excitement about flash. Javascript had the capacity for animation and most importantly ajax, but because of the number of ways different browsers exposed their DOMs (Document Object Models) it meant that it wasn’t a perfect solution. A few years ago, however out of no-where, a toolkit popped up on the net that transformed the way we do interaction. jQuery development to the rescue!
jQuery simplifies both the underlying intricacies of cross-browser support and provides a streamlined toolkit that jquery developers can use in their web development efforts.
Here are five reasons why jQuery is just plain awesome:
1. Easy to learn
Due to its ability to do much with a minimal amount of code, jQuery is very easy to learn. jQuery developers are able to add flash-like interactivity to websites in a very short time. The best part, being open source, there is a mammoth amount of documentation on the jquery.com website and massive amounts of sample code thanks to the growing online community.
2. Code is minimal and human readable
The mantra of jQuery is “write less, do more” and that means you write less code and accomplish more with your time. You could easily chain together 6 lines of Javascript code into one line of jQuery. This is the reason why jQuery development is so fast! And the greatly reduced character count is advantageous to those who have low bandwidth connections!
3. Good performance
jQuery performance is awesome. Period. Whether it’s animation capabilities, UI components or DOM traversal it is faster then any flash application. A good jQuery developer will often brag about its drag-and-drop capabilities and most users will observe that web pages are more responsive. This means that visitors to your site won’t be bored waiting for your site to load. Getting them into your sales content faster means increased traffic, lower bounce rates and ultimately, increased sales!
4. Support for mobile devices
Mobile web development is a very hot topic in the web development world and as such the jQuery Team have taken steps to respond to the challenge. The jQuery framework allows jQuery developers to write a single web application that will run on the most popular smartphones and tablet platforms like iPhone and iPad. This is a very timely development as Apple starts moving away from Flash with Steve Jobs calling it a dead technology. Also, by utilizing HTML5 video canvas, jQuery can present cross-browser videos easily on desktop or mobile.
5. Advanced plugins
jQuery is very extensible from the outset. On the jQuery website, you can find thousands of plugins written by jQuery developers all over the world. The ‘fan base’ also comprises thousands of blogs that regularly post code snippets. Best of all, it’s all free. This makes developing product catalogs and interactive galleries as easy as breathing.
There are plenty of other reasons why jQuery is just plain awesome, but we’ll cover those another day!