Jquery: Features, Overview and its Future
As a web developer, the most commonly used languages for developing websites are HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Out of this Javascript is widely used by all websites. As the website gets complex, javascript that is required to write becomes more and more complex. To overcome this complexity, javascript libraries come into the picture. A javascript library is a file that contains functions that can be used to accomplish some tasks with minimal lines of code.
Jquery and its Future
Jquery is a solid and well supported javascript library. With the invention of new javascript frameworks and libraries, it is difficult for jquery to return to its prominence, but jquery will still be used by developers. Many people say that you should not use jquery and start using angular, but it totally depends upon the application you are looking at. According to some of the reports 80% of the websites use some kind of javascript in their code and 96% of those use jquery.With advancement of new javascript libraries and frameworks, it is recommended to learn basics of jquery,but not deep dive into it as it would become easy to work on the existing projects in the future as most of them are built using jquery. Jquery is bundled with bootstrap and bootstrap is used in many websites to build templates and this shows that jquery is not going to die in the near future. Some of the famous SaaS like wordpress still use jquery on their backend and for integrating plugins for their website.Even though it seems old-school, learning jquery is always beneficial to work on new projects as well.
Features of Jquery
Some of the javascript libraries that are used most commonly are D3.js, JQuery, JqueryUI, Parsley, QUnit, and out of which Jquery is the most famous and widely used by all the web developers. Jquery is a small, lightweight, and feature-rich javascript library that is used by more than 80 million websites worldwide. Jquery eases website development by wrapping up small tasks that require many lines of javascript code into methods. Apart from these, jQuery also simplifies tasks like HTML document traversal, animation, visual effects, event handling, and ajax calls with easy-to-use APIs.
Some of the features of the Jquery library are:
- Event Handling
- DOM/HTML manipulation
- Jquery AJAX calls
- CSS manipulation
- Animation and effects
- JSON Parsing
Manipulation and Traversing using DOM
Jquery uses Document Object Model(DOM) manipulation library to traverse and select objects. All the elements of a webpage are represented in the form of a tree wherein jquery syntax is used for finding, selecting and traversing the elements of the DOM. Lets us look at the syntax of how jquery can be used to simplify the code:
$(document).ready(ab) //ab is the callback function
As you can see, $(selector).action(), the document is the selector and .ready is the inbuilt methd of the jquery library which is used in calling a function. Now let’s look at an example to understand the functionality. Here is how you can manipulate data using DOM of the jquery library.
<html>
<head>
<script src=”https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js">
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h1></h1>
<div>
</body>
</html>
$(document).ready(() => {
$(“h1”).html(“Hello World”);
});
Jquery for manipulation
Just like CSS elements find HTML elements for adding style and beautification, in the same way, jquery selectors use DOM elements for applying effects or setting up event listeners. The syntax used for jquery selectors is $(Xyz), with a string( in place of Xyz) passed into that which is used to identify a particular element.
Some of the common ways using which the element selection happens is ;
- By ID
- By Tag Name
- By Class
- By Attribute
Tag Name:
When using a Tag name, use the tag names like h1 or div as seen in the example before. That is an example where the jquery selectors is used for writing data into the h1 tag in the example.
Select By ID:
Here is an example of how “select by ID” is used in CSS and how jquery can be used to simplify the code and make things easy.
CSS
<html>
<head>
<script src=”https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js">
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id=”image”>
<img src=”https://qwakho.com/300/300" alt=”courses”/>
<div>
</body>
</html>
Now by using Jquery Selector
$(document).ready(() => {
$(‘#image’).append(‘courses!’); //appending text to div element with id=image});
By Selecting Class
In CSS we can also select elements by giving a class name to that particular tag or element
For examples in CSS
<html>
<head>
<script src=””https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js">
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id=”image”>
<p class=”qwakho-1"></p>
<div>
</body>
</html>
Using jquery data can be appended by referring to the class name of that particular tag
$(document).ready(() => {
$(‘.qwakho-1’).append(‘get best information ‘);
//appending text to div element with class= “qwakho-1”});
Creating new elements
Creating a new element using jquery is very simple. The syntax that can be used for creating a new tag and add other tags such as h1 or list is :
$(document).ready(function () {
var div = $(“<div>”) // Create an empty div element
var List = $(“<li> qwakho </li>”) // Create list element with content “qwakho”.
var heading = $(“<h1> Hello <h1>”) // create a new heading
});
Event Handling / Actions
Actions or event handlers are functions that are activated by user interactions on your website/webpage. For suppose your website has a text input box and a button where the user can enter his details and click on the button to submit the data, an action can be triggered to store the data that is being entered in the text field upon clicking the submit button.
It is the responsibility of the event handler to start the logic when the user interacts with a particular item on the webpage. Here is the example on how the jquery event handler can be used
<html>
<head>
<script src=””https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js">
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<button> Hello There </button>
<div>
</body>
</html>
$(document).ready(() => {
$(“button”).click((event) => {
alert(“You clicked me”);
};
Jquery Ajax
Using jquery Ajax methods you can request text, HTML, JSON, or XML from a remote server using the get and post methods, and also you can directly write data into any HTML element of your website.
Conclusion
Jquery is one of the fastest and concise javascript libraries created in the year 2006. Jquery is one of the most widely used client-side libraries for developing websites. Even bigger companies like Netflix, Amazon use jquery for their development. Jquery simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animations, and many more for rapid web development.
