More Animal Crackers and Prunes Please

“I would have liked to have seen more animal crackers and prunes in my dessert.” I overheard that phrase being uttered on Food Network last night, and thought it was a good one to share with all of you.

As promised, I failed miserably at blogging three times a week like I have my Outlook calendar reminders set up for, that “Snooze” button is far to easy to hit. I’ve noticed some of my colleagues have had time to blog, so I suppose I should too, so, here’s another blog that I can chalk up and say I’ve written.

First, Web Design World Seattle 2009 is a quick few days away! Don’t look for me there, as the price tag doesn’t agree with the tight budget we’re all on these days, BUT, if you’re lucky enough to attend, it should be a great one this year. Some fantastic speakers lined up including Cameron Moll, Stephanie Sullivan, and Dan Rubin.

Here’s a statement that I’ve lived by for a number of years, much to the chagrin of some of my friends that I’ve worked on web projects with. I loath code libraries, templating engines, frameworks, and the like. My argument has been the sheer overhead these bring to projects, all the unnecessary code added, and in my opinion the maintainability of the project as a whole. Also the fact that I don’t like not knowing what the code is doing and how it’s working, one thing you have absolute knowledge of when you hand code everything yourself. However, over the years, my arguments are becoming weaker and weaker by more advanced techniques coming out to accomplish tasks. This couldn’t be any more obvious than in Javascript libraries, which is why, around a year ago, I decided I’d finally give a Javascript library a chance.

There are tons of libraries to choose from, some of the majors being jQuery, Moo Tools, Prototype, DOJO, and Yahoo’s YUI. After weighing the pros, cons, looking at implementation, code examples, I settled on jQuery as the library I would at least try. At this point, I couldn’t be happier using jQuery, and don’t think I’d start another project without it. The simplicity of the code required to do even some of the most complex DOM manipulation is amazing, and chances are, if you don’t know how to accomplish a task, it’s likely that someone has already tried it and put out a tutorial on how to do it. The transition from beginning jQuery to being adapt in it is very quick, as there are a number of great tutorial sites out there. There is also an extensive plugin database as well a great number of extended libraries that utilize jQuery. All in all, my pilgrimage into the depths of (at least this) Javascript library was a pleasant one, though the same thing cannot be said about frameworks, but that’s another blog post all together.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post and review some of the jQuery code we’ll be using on the new Pierce College website.

Resources

• Tutorials: Learning jQuery
• Extended UI Library: jQuery TOOLS
• Extended UI Library: jQuery UI
• Plugins: Plugin Repository

This entry was posted on July 09th, 2009 and is filed under Website, jQuery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.