As a web developer for more than 5 years now, I can see tools and frameworks I have used evolved and improved. Some have emerged and some have submerged. I have been a great PHP fan from the start and then tried out Ruby on Rails and which is really a cool framework.

One of the coolest part of Ruby on Rails is its Ajax integration through prototype. By the time I know prototype Javascript library, I was really amazed for having such a concept. And have been using it in most of my application from then on along with its sidekick scriptaculous Javascript library.

Then I heard something about JQuery and opted to take a look at it. I was surprised how a cool library like prototype looks like a bad one. (No offense to the creator of prototype because it was cool, i mean it and I've used it) But JQuery is just more appealing to me and to think of its size, I can't imagine how it will progress in the next couple of months.

There are several things I love about JQuery:

XPATH

$('p:first') will look for the first paragraph element in the document. Isn't that cool? There are several things more than that when it comes to XPATH search such as "../../div". Take a look at the JQuery page.

Chainable

Every item matched on your search expression is chainable. $('p').html("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.").show('fast'); This will search for all your paragraph elements and put an html code inside it as the parameter and then show all those paragraphs in case they are hidden.

Events

They made it pretty simple to add an event to an object. $('p:first').click(new function() { alert("hello world"); }); will bind a click function to the first paragraph element and alerts the user once it is clicked.

Plugins

It has never been easier to create your own plugin. There has been several individuals who have created several plugins for JQuery and to think that most of them are less than 10KB which saves you a lot of bandwith.

All I can say is, "JQuery Rocks!". JQuery has a great place in the future of Javascript and Ajax libraries. I believe that there are a number of frameworks who want to incorporate JQuery. Time will tell.