Nov 03 2008
jQuery Emerges as Most Popular Javascript Library for Web Development
It seems to be official: jQuery is gaining ground faster than any other JavaScript Library. There may be many reasons but I like to think that jQuery is leading the pack due to its simplicity and relatively small size. Here is what Google Trends is showing us:
Top Reasons for jQuery’s ground gaining:
- Simplicity.
- Small in size: only 15K for latest production release after its minified and gzipped.
- Extendable: pretty big plugin library. Currently showing hundreds of plugins.
- CSS3 Compliant and one of the first JS Library to use CSS selectors.
- Handles AJAX very well while avoiding code bloating.
- Major adoption by ASP.NET developers and teaming up with ASP.NET’s team for improved integration
jQuery Resources:
- jQuery Official Site
- jQuery Plugins
- Chat with John Resig, Creator of jQuery
- jQuery Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008
- jQuery 1.2 Cheat Sheet
Other Javascript Libraries:
All these Javascript frameworks provide the basic idea of single developer resource for cross browser and cross platform JavaScript development. Additionally, all make AJAX a little bit easier:
If you know of any additional interesting jQuery Resources, drop me a line. Thanks!
Wow. Wouldn’t have thought that its this popular. We’re using extjs in out portalengine and I thought that was gaining popularity fast… but now that I’ve checked it on google trends (thanks to the idea in your post) I’m amazed to see how wrong I was. I would bet the small footprint and extendibility are the key features of spreading. Wonder what jump will occur after the VS support?
Gergely,
According to my team, jQuery will be shipped with Visual Studio moving forward: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx.
So, probably the next VS service pack, whenever that is. This I am sure will increase jQuery’s popularity quite a bit.