“jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.” – Wikipedia 2009
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the most plain speaking way to describe jQuery is that it’s a layer that sits on top of JavaScript and HTML, enabling you as a developer to easily code manipulations in your web page, such as doing something on a click event, or making elements in your page animate or change colour. jQuery is obviously more than this, but in a nutshell it’s aim is to make your life easier by giving you great flexibility whilst writing minimal lines of code.
A great example of it’s simplicity is it’s animation functionality. jQuery has an “animate” function which you give some parameters such as CSS properties, and a speed of execution. jQuery takes what would be a large chunk of javascript code and puts it into a one liner, such as:
$("myElement").animate({"height": "80px"}, 1500);The above example would take an HTML element on your page, such as a DIV element called “myElement” and animating it’s height to 80 pixels. The “1500″ quoted at the end is the time it takes to execute that animation, so in this case, 1500 milliseconds.
