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jQuery

jQuery is an open source, cross browser JavaScript library that simplifies event handling, animations and developing Ajax - enabled web pages and promotes rapid application development. This article discusses jQuery - an open source JavaScript library, its features and how easily it can be integrated with Ajax and the ASP.NET MVC Framework to build applications that are rich, interactive and responsive.

So, what is jQuery anyway?

The jQuery official web site states, “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.” jQuery was released in 2006 by John Resig. Since then, it has been widely popular and acceptable worldwide amongst the web application development community world – wide. Most importantly, numerous plug-ins of jQuery are available. Extensibility of the jQuery library is simple - just attach a plug-in to it and you are done! Microsoft will be integrating jQuery with future releases of Visual Studio.

Why jQuery? Why is it so special?

JavaScript had varying DOM and CSS implementations across different browsers. In addition, the event management interfaces used to differ in JavaScript for different browsers. jQuery on the other hand provides a common browser API that provides cross browser support and provides more robust and readable JavaScript code with simplicity of use. Usage of jQuery also reduces the code drastically. Numerous plug-ins for jQuery are available now. jQuery intellisense, a great feature, is now available as a free download. Microsoft is all set to ship jQuery with future versions of Visual Studio.

Key Features of jQuery

Support for Browser independence: jQuery is supported by most of the modern day browsers.

Support for a simplified Event Handling model: jQuery provides support for an excellent, easy to use normalized event handling model with much reduced code. The jQuery Event Handling model is consistent across all browsers. The even object is a cross browser normalized one and one event object is always passed as a parameter to an event handler.

Support for Seamless extensibility: jQuery provides support for extensibility through an easy to use plug-in API that enables extending the jQuery core library seamlessly.

Pre-requisites

To get started with jQuery you should have the following installed in your system:

Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

jQuery Library

Visual Studio 2008 jQuery Plug-in

Downloading jQuery

You can download the jQuery library from this link: http://jquery.com/

As of this writing, the current version of jQuery is 1.3.2

Getting started with jQuery

In this section, we will explore how we can get started with jQuery in ASP.NET in a step-by-step manner.

Note: To get a feel of jQuery intellisense in Visual Studio 2008, you should install the HotFix: KB958502 that comes free from Microsoft. You should also download the jQuery Intellisense file and place it side by side along with the jQuery library in your Visual Studio solution, i.e., place it in the same path.