A public jQuery forum is probably not the place to address non-
Believers - that is, people who do not use jQuery - but my hope is
that some of the Believers here will take this and pass it on to any
non-Believers who they know, to help convert the Poor Sods who are
wasting their time writing code to traverse and manipulate their
[X]HTML DOMs.
To help put this in context a bit, i want to lay my credentials out on
the table, so that nobody will think that this letter is coming from a
noob script-kiddie. My first line of code (in BASIC, no less) was
pounded out on Christmas day of 1983. Since that day my life has more
or less been centered around computing. Since 1994 i have worked
professionally with computers, and since over 10 years i've earned my
daily bread by programming in a variety of languages, such as Java, C+
+ and PHP. i run a couple of Open Source projects, such as http://toc.sf.net,
http://SpiderApe.sf.net, and, my personal favourite, http://s11n.net.
i also write technical papers from time to time (http://
wanderinghorse.net/computing/papers/).
So... now that that's out of the way...
When i first caught wind of jQuery, the name made it sound like an SQL
library for Java. As i have absolutely zero need for such a tool, i
ignored jQuery. Over the months i came across more and more mentions
of it on the net, and finally got curious enough to actually take a
peek.
On the home page of jquery.com we are immediately faced with the
second arch-enemy of programmers everywhere: a Statement of Hype. It
speaks thusly:
"You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of
tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it's down to two or
three lines and it couldn't get any shorter unless it read your mind."
- Dave Methvin
Barf! Hype!
(The first arch-enemy of programmers is of course the Marketing
Department, who are themselves normally responsible for generating
Hype. But, in fact, we have a symbiotic relationship with Marketing,
so we should not bemoan them too much.)
Despite the suspicious smell of Marketing, we poke around the site
nonetheless. If jQuery is mentioned so often on the net, the
implication is that there actually is something worth looking at.
(Err... that doesn't always hold true, but that's another story
altogether. *cough*PHPNuke*cough*) After perusing a few of the online
examples, jquery seems to be pretty slick. With a download of only
21k, it is hard to resist downloading it, so we do.
While it takes a little while to set up a few useful examples, the
more we use jQuery, the more useful it seems to be. We continually
return to the web site to browse the tutorials and API documentation.
After a day or two we are fairly comfortable with it, and All is Good.
Then we decide we need More. Now that jQuery has freed us from the
Tedium of the DOM, we want our web pages to do More. We want to add
animation effects, tabbed controls, and whatnot. Those are a lot of
work to implement, and we have not, so far, done so because it is so
tedious to do so. We start to write some code to implement them, and
quickly give up in frustration, as jQuery has spoiled us so completely
that our stomachs retch violently when we write
"document.createElement(...)" and "document.getElementById()".
Then we get the idea/hope that perhaps jquery can also help in such a
job. Despite the fact that "query" has very little to do with such
features (at least on the surface), we poke around the jQuery plugins
repository to see what others have done. The size of the repository
immediately impresses us. (But our enthusiasm is held in check by the
memory of the great number of plugins written by script kiddies for
crap software like PHPNuke.)
Wow... not only are these additional features already available as
plugins, but some of them are available in multiple flavours, so we
can pick and choose. As we browse the plugins we note a pattern - the
source code files for the plugins are typically under two kilobytes.
Yes, 2k. Unheard of - complete, useful code that's under 2k? No way.
Yes, brothers and sisters, it is possible. It is proven and
demonstrated dozens of times over on jquery.com. But it is only
possible because the jQuery developers have brought us such a Damned
Slick framework. The word "framework" sounds suspiciously like
Something from the Marketing Department, but don't let that deter you
- simply interpret it as "a collection of pre-defined functionality
off of which to build more functionality." (But framework" is a lot
easier to say.)
If you do any significant amount of browser-based JavaScripting (as
opposed to embedded code, such as using SpiderMonkey or Rhino), take a
few minutes to look over jQuery. Then take a few hours to get
comfortable with it. Then weep for all of the hours you've previously
wasted writing tedious code to traverse and manipulate DOM nodes, and
know that the days of the Tedium of the DOM are past, and that we can
now bask in the light of this next step in the evolution of JavaScript
applications.
http://jquery.com/
We now have a choice to make: 1) weep for those Poor Bastards who do
not Believe, or 2) help the Poor Bastards who do not Believe. If you
choose (1), then stop here and weep (or laugh) all you like. If you
choose (2), pass around the jQuery URL (hint: http://jquery.com) to
any Poor Bastards you know, point them to the numerious tutorials and
the API documentation, and then watch gleefully as they sob away their
pent-up frustrations and shout like madmen, "aaaarrrrgggghhhh! If I
had only known this two weeks ago, before our project deadline had
passed!"
Amen, brothers and sisters.
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/js/
11 July 2007
PS: i am in no way affiliated with jquery.com. In fact, i was, until
very recently, one of the above-mentioned Poor Bastards.
