jQuery Introduction

Show of hands, who knows about jQuery?

I’m willing to bet that if you’re in the IT or web world, you’ve heard the name thrown around. Whether or not in the context of AJAX it doesn’t really matter–but how often do you just skip over the topic and not really give it a thought? Until a few months ago I hadn’t really paid much attention to jQuery, or the implementation of AJAX in my work. I’d used it a few times, and call me old fashioned, but the platform I was working on worked just fine, met customer expectations and performed well. This was until I started following a few key people on Twitter, who I now blame for my obsession of trying to introduce jQuery in everything I do.

So what is jQuery? Simply put it’s a web application framework written in JavaScript that enables rich manipulation of HTML. Odds are that every single one of you has in someway touched jQuery on a website; be it through dynamic styling, form validation, chromeless popups, or rich data interactivity. Everything from that slick drag-and-drop capability for ordering your Netflix queue to the vast majority of Facebook interactivity is all possible with the use of jQuery.

jQuery Integration

Now fast forward past the initial discovery of the real power of jQuery; how do you practically integrate it into your platform? It’s one thing to see the potential, and quite another to make that integration clean and functional. There’s some great jQuery plugins available, and while you may have heard of some of the big ones (prototype, draggable, etc.) there’s literally hundreds out there. jQuery offers a UI library that includes a host of useful user interface elements, and when you want to take your platform to the next level, Marc Anderson has written a jQuery library for Windows SharePoint Services that easily enables rich data features such as cascading drop-downs, manipulation of lookup fields, and dynamic use of the SharePoint web services. Admittedly (credit where credit is due), I fully blame Marc for my new found obsession with jQuery.