Despite having cross-browser incompatibility issues and various things breaking and being re-done with each release, I’m firmly in the jQuery camp and am actively building new things on top of it. This likely includes a port of PHP Tag Engine to jQuery, as well as many of my WordPress plugins.
It’s like the old story:
You’re a coach deciding between two runners. They both run the 100m equally fast. One has perfect form. The other has terrible form. Who do you chose?
You chose the runner with terrible form. Why? Because when he finally has perfect form he’ll wax the floor with the other runner.
YUI and Prototype/Scriptaculous are much more polished now, but I see the ease of authoring in jQuery to be too big a developer benefit for it not to rise to the top in the long run.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Chris adds this Comment:
Agreed. I recently made the switch, and now I can’t get enough of jQuery.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
someguy adds this Comment:
Especially since Prototype/Scriptaculous are so friggin heavy (200K+), the minimal size of jQuery (minified + gzipped ~ 13k) makes a significant difference on heavy-traffic sites (our site gets about 1 mm hits per day).
Needless to say, P+S are out, jQ is in.
April 4th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Asbjørn Ulsberg adds this Comment:
I’ve made the switch to jQuery too and although I think the documentation could be better and more extensive, Firebug makes everything related to JS development so easy that I manage well without it.
Apropos WordPress, am I the only one who finds its plugin “framework” (or lack thereof) a bit disappointing? There isn’t a good way to ensure only one jQuery file is included, etc. Having a lot of different plugins from a lot of different authors enabled often makes the resulting HTML extremely bloated and incompabilities between plugins are very hard to discover and solve.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:09 am
J P adds this Comment:
jQuery made me a believer in javascript again! Actually, it’s the fact that I no longer have to code for NN4 and IE5 on Mac that brought me back. For a few years I was happy to “javascript is evil” and end any discussion at that.
And I do agree that it currently doesn’t have “perfect form”, which is another reason to love it.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Henry adds this Comment:
Being a non developer, I love JQuery. I started to use it with Ext JS and found the two a great combination. Hats off to both teams for their great contribution.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:24 am