Hi, I'm Dustin Mays, a student developer in A&S Computing Services. For the past two or three months, I've been hacking away at a super-sekrit web app for a researcher here at A&S. Since I've previously only targeted traditional offline computer environments, and had no prior web development experience, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. Unlike traditional software development, web development is, for lack of a better word, "rough". Before I get to the meat of my post, allow me to give you a little background (if you're familiar with software development, feel free to skip the next two or three paragraphs).

First, where traditional software is typically written using one programming language (and optionally a language for storing structured data), modern web applications and websites will use at least three languages: CSS, HTML and Javascript. For the uninitiated, HTML is a document layout (or markup) language: it describes what items are on a page, and their general layout; CSS is a style language: it allows for fine-tuning of an element's (any item on a web page, like a block of text, an image, a link, etc) appearance and position; and JavaScript (which I'll be talking about most in this post) is a scripting language (surprise!) that runs as part of the web browser, and allows for the implementation of interactive functionality and client-side (in-browser) applications.

Second, the typical web app/website will need to support the three big Windows browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox), as well as Safari on Mac OS X. Naturally, since all of these browsers are written by different companies/communities, they will have unique quirks, bugs, and features that make cross-browser development challenging, at best, and at worst, drives even the best developers to insanity. Traditional software has this problem as well, and many solutions have been implemented, the most popular class of solutions being the cross-platform frameworks. Cross-platform frameworks are bundles of code that wrap up similar functionality across disparate platforms and provide a common interface to that code. This allows the application developer to code against and deploy for the cross-platform framework, rather than the underlying operating systems directly. As you can imagine, this helps to make things much simpler for developers. Examples of cross-platform application frameworks include the GTK toolkit, the Qt toolkit, wxWidgets, FLTK, and GNUStep.

In the past few years, a similar trend has come about in the web development community. These tend to go by different names, depending on what buzzword or marketing point is the most popular, and are usually called cross-browser frameworks, or JavaScript frameworks, or Ajax frameworks. Web developers are now able to include one (or more!) of these frameworks in their websites and code against them, rather than having to target browsers and implement browser-specific functionality all the time (although it's still necessary once in a while).

Whew! That was a lot of background. Now we can get back to talking about my web app. Like I mentioned earlier, when I started on this web app, I was pretty inexperienced as a web developer. To make my life simpler, I checked out various web app frameworks, and was dissatisfied with nearly all of them; they either wanted to take control of the web app, or their programming interface was wonky, or they had too much functionality, or not enough functionality. Finally, though, I came across jQuery. jQuery. Just thinking about it makes me want to hack on something.

jQuery is a JavaScript framework for the developer who just wants to GET THINGS DONE with minimal fuss. It doesn't force a specific programming style on you, it doesn't force unnecessary boilerplate code or "features" on you, and it doesn't force ridiculous limitations on you. jQuery allows you to use the functionality that you want, when you want it, and it makes it super simple to do so.

jQuery has been a huge boon to me. For example, I like to split my code into manageable, logical chunks. This is standard practice in both JavaScript development and the traditional desktop software world, but HTML doesn't account for that, as it's expected that ALL the HTML code that's necessary for a page is in one big HTML file. This runs contrary to how I think and work, and jQuery had a solution: the jQuery.load() method.

Example Code:
---main.html---
<html>
   <head>
      <title>MAIN.HTML PAGE</title>
      <script src="js/jquery.js">
      <script src="js/main.js">
   </head>
   <body>
      <div id="iamadiv">
      </div>
   </body>
</html>

---helloworld.html---
<p>HELLO WORLD</p>

---js/main.js---
(function ($) {
   $("#iamadiv").load("/helloworld.html");
})(jQuery);

This is a very contrived example, but it is representative of the solution jQuery had for my problem. Basically, the code in js/main.js gets executed when its file is loaded, and then it loads the helloworld.html file and copies its contents into the div "iamadiv". The result is shown in the screenshot below.



The other example I want to cover is the ease with which jQuery enables the modification of the HTML document at runtime, of which you got a taste above. jQuery has this awesome feature called selectors, which enable you to easily select entities inside the DOM (the HTML document object model, which is basically a tree-like structure of everything in the current document). It looks like this:

--code--
$("#iamadiv")
--------

Note: jQuery has a function called jQuery(), which is how you access ALL the jQuery functionality. For simplicity's sake, they created a shortcut to jQuery() called $(). It's the same thing, just easier to type.

$() takes an argument, or series of arguments. These arguments are the selectors. Using CSS notation (and sometimes some jQuery-specific notation), you can pass as arguments the HTML entities that you want to modify. Not only can you select single entities (using the id selector "#"), you can select GROUPS of entities. There are many different ways to select groups, but the most popular are by HTML class and by entity type (e.g. all text inputs, all paragrahs, all divs, all buttons). This ability to modify the document at runtime has made it intuitive to create HTML forms where I can add extra options when a user clicks a button, add items to lists dynamically, and, when combined with jQuery UI, theme UI elements (like buttons, text boxes, etc).

Example Code:
---main.html---
<html>
   <head>
      <title>JQUERY SELECTOR AND JQUERY UI EXAMPLE</title>
      <script src="js/jquery.js"></script>
      <script src="js/jqueryui.js"></script>
      <script src="js/main.js"></script>
      <link type="text/css" href="css/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.8.13.custom.css" rel="Stylesheet" />
   </head>
   <body>
      <button id="supabutton">CLICK ME</button>
      <div id="textcontainer">
      </div>
   </body>
</html>

---main.js---
$(document).ready(function () {
   $("button").button(); // this uses the jQuery element selector to select all button entities,
});                                // and calls the jQuery UI button() method on the selected buttons to make them pretty!

$("#supabutton").live('click', function () {
   $("#textcontainer").append("WOAH<br />");
});

This bit of code requires the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries. The HTML file is all very hum-drum, nothing exciting in it, except for the inclusion of the jQuery and jQuery UI libs and CSS file. main.js is where the cool stuff happens. In here, there is a function $(document).ready(). This gets called after the HTML page has finished loading. In this function is a call to $("button").button(). This uses the jQuery element selector to select all buttons in the document (which in this case is ouronly button, supabutton) and calls the jQuery UI function $.button(). This applies the jQuery UI button theme to our button. Nifty.

Next is the $.live() function. Basically, what this does is add an event handler to every supabutton that is created (in this case, just the one). Event handlers are a way for a web site/web app (or any application, really) to respond to external stimuli, such as a button press, a resize of the browser window, editing of a text box, etc. In this case, this bit of code adds an event handler to supabutton for the 'click' event, and when supabutton is clicked, it appends the text 'WOAH' to the #textcontainer div. Awesome! This is realtime modification of the HTML document! Screenshots of this example are below.

Fig1. This shows the page in its fresh, just-loaded state. Note that the button has been themed by jQuery UI, and there is no other text on the page.

Fig. 2 Now, after clicking the button a few times, several lines with the text 'WOAH' have been added. Neat!

I hope I've given you an adequate taste of the awesomeness that is jQuery. It has really made my life easier, and my work immensely enjoyable. For those that are inclined, don't be afraid to try it! There is a small learning curve at first, especially with selectors, but everything after that is smooth sailing. Enjoy!

Edit:  Whoops! Forgot to add links to jQuery and jQuery UI.  jQuery jQueryUI