Thursday, April 30, 2009

Producing Stable Javascript with jQuery

If one were to view the page source of ten random different web pages, a large percentage, if not all, of those pages would contain some form of javascript. Applications that use the web browser has the delivery medium are using javascript more and more. Of course, the developers creating these pages aren't using javascript just for the sake of it. Javascript is often introduced to a web page that is lacking in a rich, interactive, user experience. In order for any javascript code to effectively change the way the user experiences the web page, the DOM elements that make up the page need to be manipulated. This means that the javascript needs to be able to locate a specific DOM element or search for a set of DOM elements that meet some specified criteria. One we have obtained a DOM element, or a set of DOM elements in our code, we need to perform actions on these elements in order to manipulate them. In the case of a set of DOM elements, this set needs to be iterated while invoking behavior on each element. Using tradition javascript DOM manipulation can lead to nothing short of a nightmare. On top of the messy code, developers have the added burden of making it work on all browsers. Thankfully, the jQuery toolkit helps alleviate some of this madness by providing some consistency.

At the core of jQuery is the jQuery() query function. This function allows developers to execute DOM element quires at any level of complexity. The function can be used to fetch a single DOM element by id, or using other query constraints such as class or attribute to retrieve a set of DOM elements. The result set returned by the jQuery() function is actually another javascript object. Methods may be invoked on this object. The interesting aspect of this is that the invoked behavior is called for each element in the result set, not just the result set object. If the result set contains a single DOM element, the invoked behavior is called for that single element. If the result set contains several DOM elements, the invoked behavior is applied to every element. If the result set contains no elements, the behavior isn't invoked. This is extremely useful because behavior will never be invoked on a non-existent DOM element. No error handling or looping constructs need to be implemented by the developer. jQuery also projects a shorthand $() function for the main jQuery() function. This, however can be hard on the eyes after a while.

If your javascript also employs logic other than manipulating the DOM, jQuery is also powerful in this area. The jQuery() function also accepts javascript arrays. Developers can then invoke the each() function on the result set. This provides a consistent way to iterate through javascript arrays. This is mostly important because trying to get the same javascript array iteration code to work on multiple browsers isn't easy. Why write the cross-browser code when it is already done?

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