The Newbies Guide to jQuery

The Newbies Guide to jQuery

If you’re an active participant on web developer forums, you may have come across interesting debates on the relevance and worthiness of jQuery. However, anyone who understands the history of JavaScript as a programming language, knows how this popular library was born and the browser compatibility issues it helped resolve.

For many front-end developers, this was the very first JavaScript library they committed their time to learn as it was easier to use than the standard Document Object Model (DOM). If you’re just getting started with front-end web development, jQuery—particular in combination with tools from platforms like JFrog—are certainly a solid place to start. Here’s what you need to know about this library.

What is jQuery?

Simply put, jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes managing and writing JavaScript quicker, easier, and more pleasant for front-end developers. Think of it as a set of tools that allow web developers to “do more, with less” JavaScript.

Instead of writing many lines of JavaScript code to perform common tasks, this JavaScript library allows you to perform multiple actions or implement a functionality with a single line of code. That’s essentially what “write less, do more” is all about. And it means you get to save a significant amount of time and effort when using jQuery.

What is jQuery Used For?

jQuery solves most of the JavaScript challenges that both beginner and expert front-end web developers experience. It simplifies things like CSS manipulation, event handling, HTML/DOM manipulation, filtering arrays, HTML document traversal, and performing AJAX calls and effects.

The fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use library greatly shortens and clarifies JavaScript programming— and you don’t need to be an expert at reading code to see that. As a programmer, you’d definitely want to use a library that lets you create applications more quickly and with fewer errors or bugs. That’s why jQuery is so popular. Netflix, IBM, Microsoft, and Google are just some of the leading companies that use the library in their applications.

More Benefits of Using jQuery

In addition to shortening and clarifying JavaScript programming, there are more reasons why front-end web developers are still using this beautiful library. They include:

• jQuery features plugins that come with extra features. As a web developer, you can take advantage of the 1000s of jQuery plugins freely available to create and add effects and key features to a website. What’s even more interesting is that you can apply these plugins to almost every functionality or situation you can think of, with little to no effort. And that’s probably why it’s clearly the most highly utilized JavaScript framework and has a more diverse community than any other JavaScript library.
• jQuery ensures cross-browser compatibility. Using jQuery not only saves you lots of time and effort but saves you a ton of headaches since the code is compatible with all the major browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome. You, therefore, don’t have to worry about dependency issues.
• jQuery doesn’t overload a web page. As mentioned, jQuery is an efficient, lightweight JavaScript framework, which essentially means using it won’t affect the load time of your web page.

How Does Artificatory Help jQuery?

Most people looking to join the world of programming often kick off their journey with front-end web development, and jQuery tends to be their starting point. Ask any seasoned web developer and they’ll tell you jQuery and JavaScript are the two languages that make a website come to life with interaction and movement after forming its bones and skin with HTML and CSS.

The challenge of finding, downloading, and keeping track of all your jQuery packages and their dependencies has since been taken care of by package management tools.

However, as web developers increasingly make extensive usage of both open-source, in-house proprietary libraries, and other binary components to cut costs and improve code quality, it can be extremely difficult to find something specific from the multitude of packages in a system.

Other challenges that arise include ensuring security and access control, tracking binary versions to reproduce builds, ensuring quick and consistent access to remote artifacts, offline access to packages, and sharing proprietary code and binaries with other developers in a team.

With the emergence of artifactory, you no longer have to worry about these issues. Think of artifactory as an intermediary between front-end web developers and the external repositories that you need for your work on a regular basis. In the event of a network issue and you can’t gain access to a repository, artifactory caches your packages locally in a remote repository, granting you reliable and consistent access so you can continue to work.