Why jQuery Rocks

Up till now, I've been a big fan of the Prototype/Scriptaculous combination to get some nice web20 functionality built into my apps. I always keep an eye out for other cool libraries, but Scriptaculous provided a nice feature set out of the box, and it's really easy to implement a lot of the solutions. And I think Prototype still has the best syntax for making XmlHttpRequests.

But props go out to Rey Bango for pointing me in the right direction and turning me on to jQuery. I always thought jQuery was just another javascript library until I saw the amazing array of plugins available. There are over 100 plugins to do all kinds of stuff - even one to get back prototypes handy $F() function :).

It seems like most of the neat tools and tricks that Scriptaculous offered, be it autocompleters, in place editing, effects, etc., are all available as plugins. It's always important to have a strong developer community, and with the easy plugin architecture, jQuery has just that. I can already see a whole bunch of things I'd like to try out and implement in my applications.

Props go out to John Resig for creating jQuery and to the many plugin contributors. You've made lots of difficult things very easy!!!

Oh yeah, and it's lightweight too.. Just 15k for the jQuery and many plugins coming in at under 1k. Awesome!