Articles pour le mot-clé ‘jQuery’


jQuery has been kind of a buzz word in the last 2 years. This technology started really small but it is now endorsed by a lot of major web players,  have a complete development team of more than 10 talented developers, and there is currently 3 or 4 conferences a year organized by the team on the sole purpose of talking about it with other web developers. It is a technology we use heavily at w.illi.am/. If for you jQuery only rings in your head with some kind of AJAX, well read this out and the next time you ask you your developers team about jQuery they might not look at you with round big eyes and say « yes… yes… »

The jQuery mojo is write less do more, and this is exactly what it’s meant to do. This is an API that help you write better javascript. Unfortunately it is really hard to write good javascript on all browsers. What jQuery does is take your jQuery code and dispatch it to every browser in the more efficient way possible. This enables developers to write faster and better javascript. It adds some functionalities too, like for example animations.

Not unlike Adobe Flash, with jQuery it is possible to animate  objects on your web page, this is however limited. While you can do easing and opacity effects, you cannot rotate or use « photoshop effect » directly from javascript. Well used, you can create nice and clean animation with jQuery, but trying too hard might result in a look that feel like flash but not really as good as flash.

The famous AJAX

This is a common error for non-tech teams to actually refer jQuery as AJAX, in fact this is only a subset of functionality of javascript and not javascript itself. AJAX refers to asynchronous JavaScript and XML, what it means is that you can load external XML or HTML to and from your page. For example,  a form on the web normally sends you to another page when submitting it. Using AJAX, you could submit the form to your server in javascript using AJAX without quitting the page. Most recent websites make a major use of AJAX without the user noticing it to update content or save users preference.

Using it without an API like jQuery is pretty hard because of it’s weird syntax. This is somewhere jQuery really shines, because it enable you to do a lot, without wanting to bang your head on the wall. Because of javascript API like jQuery, using AJAX has been made a lot more easier and also popular, this might have to do with why people often call jQuery as an AJAX technology.

If you want more information on jQuery I would suggest you visit the official website.  There is a lot of information on the website and looking at the documentation might help you understand how jQuery can be beneficial for your website or company.

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Ask web developers what they hate most about web technologies, chances are they will say javascript, and for some parts, they are right to do so. But to understand why Javascript is so much hated we need to go back in time. In the early years of Netscape, in 1995.

In the nineties, Netscape was flourishing with between 50% and 80% of the browsers’ market and was in a intense combat with Internet Explorer. A guy at Netscape, named Brendan Eich, was given a difficult task of creating a language to make Netscape interacting more dynamically with websites. And of course they wanted this language the day before they asked it . In the time Brendan had, he did the most he could, and created a versatile language that even script kids could pick up, Javascript, he also created the DOM (Document Object Model) on top of Javascript. Now the difference between Javascript and the DOM is simple. Javascript is the basic language you use to make sentence. But the DOM is what is understanding this sentence and makes it interact with the document the way you asked it.

Microsoft was not going to let that happen

Microsoft was certainly not going to let Netscape have « Javascript » and not them, they decided to reverse engineer and implement it in Internet Explorer. Now problems began. They, very unfortunately, did not do a very good job at this implementation. Which means that for doing one simple operation on Netscape and Internet explorer, you had to code 2 implementation for both of them, because the DOM was not understanding the same sentence for both. In fact javascript, the programming language is mostly fine, the biggest problem is the DOM API, some words means nothing to IE and some other means nothing to Firefox. This is what drives web developers crazy. You have to write code specifically to some browsers because they do not follow standards, you have no choice, Internet Explorer represent 67% of your user base, you have to do an implementation for them.

javascript Javascript, the most misunderstood coding language

You need to understand that this happened in 1995. The web did not had the same needs than today. Now web applications are vastly more complex. Some people had to step up and create cross browser API’s to deal with the DOM, and they did. Which means now you write one line, and some API dispatch the good implementation to each browser. This has make the life of web developers much easier.

There is currently 3 major « all round » Javascript libraries, jQuery, Mootools and Prototype

At w.illi.am, we decided to use the jQuery framework, which is now endorsed by a lot of major players, like Microsoft. Not only this is the most use Javascript framework in the world, this is the one we found the most powerful. Writing Javascript with jQuery enabled us to create more powerful web site than ever before and this tool is one of many that make us confident that we are ready for the future of the web.

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