Now, if you’ve ever heard me talking about programming languages and my preferences in this area, you might know that I really hate javascript. And it is really disgusting that most code you have to write for today’s web applications happens to be javascript (with a little bit html and a lot of brain bursting css). How do we poor developers deserve this? I really don’t know – and I really don’t understand why nobody is doing something against this.
In the past years I used (was forced to use) various javascript libs. Btw, why are there so many overlapping javascript libraries? People are mocking about the huge number of java web application frameworks, but nearly noone is mocking about too many javascript libs. It’s a strange world after all (or was it a small world? hmm).
Now, eventually, a good friend and collegue, Felix, mentioned jQuery as an alternative. I always thought that our Sling slogan “Bringing back the fun” is the greatest slogan on earth, but jQuery’s “write less. do more” is even more intriguing. As I wanted to do some ui updates on the Apache Felix web console, I read the jQuery tutorials, looked at the examples, read the api docs etc.
And I’m really impressed – well, it’s still javascript..sigh – but the approach is very appealing and I managed to get something running in a very short time frame. For instance, adding sorting to a table is just one line of code. You “attach” the table sorter plugin to the already existing html table. And that’s it. So if you start with POH (plain old html) improving your ui with jQuery is really simple and easy. Amazing.
So I can only suggest everyone to take a look. I didn’t do that much so far with jQuery, so I can’t tell that much atm. Currently it seems that the docs are partially outdated and there is an unbelievable amount of plugins which I think is the same mess as the eclipse plugins. It’s really hard to tell which plugins are useful or what they do and even harder to decide if this is a good and active plugin. But I guess this will improve over time.