JQuery

JQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript Library. It supports many browsers. It allows us to elegantly and efficiently traverse through HTML elements with minimum lines of code. In few days only JQuery has become very popular JavaScript Library. Few of its characteristics are: -
1) Light Weight
2) Cross browser compatibility
3) Simplicity

If any code is of 10 lines with traditional JavaScript, we can write in a single line using JQuery. Many people get confused between JavaScript and JQuery. Many think they are same. But it’s not! JavaScript is language whereas JQuery is a library which is written using JavaScript. Latest version of JQuery is 1.4.1. They provide two copies of JQuery –
1) Minified (23 kb zipped)
2) Uncompressed (157 kb)

Minified versions are used for production developments while uncompressed versions are used for debugging and reading. Out of these two, minified versions are best inspite of having large file size. You can download JQuery from here

There are many plugins available for JQuery which provide UI elements or special effects. Such plugins require very little JavaScript code but can do amazing things. Using JQuery is very simple, you should just simply add a like to the jQuery.js file in your html document.

We will see more on JQuery in next blogpost.