jQuery – What’s not to like?

jQuery has been around for a while. So what’s not to like? Well, when it’s the first word in a sentence it means the sentence starts uncapitalized. Not so bad. It’s a little hefty too – coming in at a whopping 120,763 bytes as of 1.3.2 un-minified. That’s a ton of code to be bringing in on every request just to do, well, everything under the sun you could imagine, and some stuff you haven’t imagined yet. Slide-ins, slide-outs, fades, modal windows, ajax calls, xml and json processing… the list goes on.

Learning Curve

Of course, jQuery is the very epitomy of “don’t re-invent the wheel”. Aside from the base library itself there are literally 1000′s of well-written examples of how to make use of it out there, together with 100′s of plugins. That’s right. javascript plugins, if you could imagine that.  But the learning curve on jQuery is quite steep. In the wrong hands it’s hundreds of large caliber weapons aimed directly at your feet. Such is the life of a developer though. The same can be said for any language or codebase, server-side or otherwise.

I’m lovin’ jQuery, despite its quirks and complexity. Filed in the toolbox.