I believe I promised to post some recaps of the presentations I attended during my visit to FITC Amsterdam the other week. This is the first one, stay tuned for more.
This is a short recap of a presentation made during FITC Amsterdam 2012. Kudos for the presentation content goes to the presenter. Please use the resource links at the end of this post to get more information from the source.
Matt Fisher made a simple but useful introduction to jQuery. For anyone who hasn't used jQuery in a project before, like myself, this was a nice presentation for getting acquainted with the framework. This is what I got out of it.
jQuery is a JavaScript framework for boosting productivity for any JavaScript developer. It was first created by John Resig in 2004 and has been developed and improved since then. Current version is 1.7.1 and its main advantage over the widely used and stable version 1.6 is all about performance improvements.
jQuery is light-weight, widely used and accepted and should, according to Matt, be an integral component in the toolbox of any serious web developer.
The jQuery framework consists of the following parts:
- jQuery core – The core APIs provided by of the jQuery framework
- jQuery UI – provides useful user interface components like tree navigators and grids
- jQuery mobile – a relatively new addition to the jQuery family for supporting development for mobile
- Qunit – A unit test framework to use for java script development
- Sizzle – The selector engine for locating elements in the dom tree of an html page
- Modify CSS
- Alter HTML
- Respond to user interaction
- Animate elements
- Retrieve information from external resources
Short examples on each of the aforementioned functionalities are available from Matt Fisher's blog.
Matt also made a strong point about the licensing of jQuery and many other open source libraries out there. jQuery adheres to the MIT Licence and all you basically have to do to freely start using the framework is to keep that copyright notice at the top of the source files. If you remove the copyright notice or start copying and pasting parts of the framework and passing it off as your own you are violating the license and by doing that you are basically breaking the law. Perhaps that goes without saying but it was clear from the reaction of the audience that many of the present developers had been doing just that.
I asked Matt about the development environment that he would suggest for starting to work with jQuery or javascript and HTML development in general. As he had grown accustomed to using eclipse based development environments he recommended Aptana Studio. That description also applies to myself so I'll be checking it out.
Resources:
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