Learning jQuery

Someone on the jQuery Google Group yesterday asked about how to display a border around elements on hover. Here is a quick script I wrote to achieve that effect:

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Since the release of jQuery 1.3 a month and a half ago, I’ve been keeping my eye on any troubles that people have had with their upgrades. Fortunately, most people have had no problems at all. For those who have, the issues have almost always been in one of three areas. Identifying these areas and adjusting any legacy scripts ahead of time will go a long way toward ensuring a smooth transition to jQuery 1.3.x.

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The .append() method is perhaps the most misused of all jQuery methods. While an extremely useful and easy method to work with, it dramatically affects the performance of your page. When misused, the .append() method can cripple your JavaScript code’s performance. When used well, it’ll keep your script humming along.

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One of the biggest concerns I’ve heard mentioned from users of the Prototype library about jQuery is the lack of support for various array methods. The robust features Prototype provides for arrays is of great benefit to developers that do a lot of array manipulation in their JavaScript.

However, I find that after moving to jQuery, I do less array manipulation than I had done with Prototype. Perhaps jQuery has altered my development pattern so I no longer need array manipulation, or perhaps I have shifted most of my data manipulation to the server. Whatever the case, I have only on occasion missed the Prototype array methods.

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If you haven’t poked around under the hood of jQuery, you might not be aware that when you pass the jQuery function an expression or DOM element it places these elements (or, possibly a single element) into an object, and then this object is returned so that it can be chained. Without getting into the details of chaining, the fundamental concept to remember is this:

Most jQuery methods return the jQuery object itself, which allows methods to be chained.

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A common feature I’ve seen on “web 2.0” sites and wikis is the “external link” icon: . While I’m not crazy about the idea of sticking these little images all over the HTML, they’re a great candidate for using progressive enhancement. In our case, we can use jQuery to add the images pretty easily.

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