Through My Lenses

Javascript is NOT the enemy. You can find peace.

Why jQuery?

powerful, wide support, works for me (after initial period of grumpy old man whining)

History

• 3 years old
• high compatibility
• free
• minified, gziped or full fat
• available on Google CDN

What does it do?

• finds stuff
• changes stuff
• loads stuff
• and more stuff

Signs that you may be looking at jQuery

• $ is jQuery
• lots and lots and lots of stuff chained together because everything returns itself

Selectors

• find soemthing
• follows CSS rules
• Basic – $(“#someId”) $(“.someClass”) $(“p”)
• $(“#parent p”) –> all paragraphs under #parent
• $(“something:not(somethingelse)”)
• also has ^ $ for beginning and end
• $(‘a[href*=cnn]‘) –> all links to anything containing cnn
• $(‘a[href$=pdf]‘) –> all links whtat end in pdf
• $(‘#favThings > li:even and dd
• :eq
• contains
• form related (checked, selected, en/disabled)
• next, prev, parent, children, and siblings
• filter (custom JS code)

Manipulation

• adding, removing classes
• setting, getting attributes
• prepending and appending
• changing contents

Events

• what you expect (click, change, etc)
• special ones (hover, toggle)
• $(document).ready

Effects

• tick me off
• “will my client want to see this 50 times?”
• hiding/showing
• fading
• bouncing
• http://docs.jquery.com/effects

Ajax

• load
• get (has length restriction)
• post
• getJSON
• getScript

Plugins

• over 2,400
• wide range of areas: ui, form, widgets, etc
• quality also covers a wide range

Favorites

• Validate
• ThickBox
• jqGrid
• jQuery Select

jQuery+CF

Helpful

• still the glue
• native JSON format
• returnFormat
• XML generation

Not So Helpful

• onRequest (EVIL++) fixed in CF9
• whitepsace
• debugging