Have you ever dreamed of building a website that interacts well with visitors, without having to hire the expertise of a scripting veteran? Have you ever imagined a User Interface performing well across all the commonly used browsers, that competes with the effects and interactivity of a flash driven website, all being delivered to you by a mediocre programmer without much scripting knowledge? If you have, then jQuery is what your looking for!

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. It is designed to change the way programmers write javascript. jQuery handles a plethora of javascript tasks with ease, and has an amazingly short learning curve.

Following are the most prominent features of jQuery:-
1. Light weight footprint (only 24 KB when minified and gzipped)
2. CSS3 compliant (supports css 1-3)
3. Cross-browser (IE 6.0+, FF 2+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.0+, Chrome)

Apart from the “write less, do more.” slogan, there are plenty of plugins or components available via the huge jQuery community, possibly for every web user experience scenarios. There are even options to customize the UI components theme and build the UI that suits your design. So, strikingly less time is spent customizing and redesigning the component theme, which has always been the woe of third party tools.

A well written jQuery code might resemble a story, so simple and readable by its nature. The sequences of events and manipulations that we perform on the DOM can be written almost with the ease of writing them in plain English, with some effortless terminologies and methods. jQuery is being used by giants such as Twitter.com, Wikipedia.org, MLB.com, Amazon.com, Bing.com, Microsoft.com, Bit.ly, ESPN.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, Netflix.com, WordPress.com and many others.

jQuery is not yet an official standard, but it has truly become the unofficial industry standard among web developers. jQuery is such a good companion that any web developer and even designers will easily fall in love with it.

About the Author :

Kiran has been working for Bobcares, as Sr. Software Engineer since April 2010. He is an expert in PHP based web development. He bags an experience of 3.8 years in the industry. His hobbies include blogging, listening to music and traveling. He is passionate about Zend framework, OO concepts and design, jQuery and much more