In Praise of jQuery

At work I'm starting to weave jQuery into the interface to our job database. Until now my Javascript needs have been limited to a menu at the top of the screen. Now I am trying to create a time entry interface, and it is complicated.

Each employee needs to be able to say "I worked on task alpha from 8:00 to 10:10, beta from 10:10 to 12:00 and gamma from 13:00 to 17:00". It needs to be easy to use, give them a list of the tasks that they are working on to choose from and make sure that their times don't overlap. This is all to say that some more advanced scripting is called for. I hacked around with vanilla Javascript for a while, but soon decided to check out one of the free libraries available.

Enter jQuery, and I could not be happier. The core feature of jQuery is that you can select elements in your document by xpath or CSS-style selectors. This alone is well worth the price of entry. For instance, originally I had to do a "document.getElementById("timebar")", use ".getElementsByTagName("div")" on that, and then check each element's class as I looped through them to remove a class. Now I just write: "$("#timebar .selentry").removeClass("selentry")". That's an if statement, a loop and a lot of long DOM method names I didn't need.

jQuery gives you all sorts of additional nice things - most of which I haven't tried yet. It includes:

• Easy creation and insertion of new elements into your document tree.
• Add, modify and remove attributes.
• Modify styles on an element without wiping out unrelated styles.
• Easily add event handlers with cross-browser problems smoothed out for you.
• Iterators.
• Handle ajax requests easily.
• Plugins to handle even more things. (I was able to easily drop the date picker into my existing date fields.)

I resisted using a Javascript library for a long time. I thought they were just for fancy ajax and slide-in effects. I also worried that they would force all my scripts to work inside their framework. With jQuery at least, my fears were unfounded. Even if you just use it to find elements in your document tree it will be extremely helpful.