Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery - Ebook-Cours.com

jQuery: Do More with Drupal
I've never been happier to eat my words.
With the birth of dynamically refreshing page renderers and the XMLHttpRequest
(XHR) object (or control), JavaScript suddenly became a much more powerful tool
for manipulating the contents of a page without requiring a full round trip to a
remote web server.
XMLHttpRequest and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) will be
the subject of Chapter 5.
But with all of this new power came a fair amount of complexity. The core JavaScript
libraries—the tools bundled in the major browsers—have remained relatively small.
And, as newer versions of browser have been released, writing working code often
requires an awful lot of boilerplate "cross-browser compatibility" code.
Where changes have been made, they are often complex. The event model in
Microsoft's IE and the one in Mozilla-based browsers diverged quite a while ago.
The DOM API, implemented on all major browsers, is anything but simple. Anyone
who has written an AJAX library from scratch will be quick to voice an opinion
on the trials and tribulations of getting that library to work on all major browsers.
Even manipulating a stylesheet from JavaScript has come with its share of subtle
implementation differences.
In short, even while the capabilities of JavaScript had reached new heights, the
JavaScript developer was often forced to use complex APIs and work around lots
of compatibility issues while building a program.
As JavaScript's capabilities and usefulness grew, another change was occurring.
This was a culture change among the JavaScript developers.
For a long time, the online JavaScript developers released useful snippets of code.
These were not libraries in the proper sense of the word, but short snippets of code
that could be copied and pasted into a project, tweaked, and then reused.
As JavaScript matured, so did the community around it. The focus shifted (to some
degree at least) from producing "useful doodads" to creating polished libraries
designed for reuse in a wide variety of settings.
Today's popular libraries, such as Prototype, YUI, Dojo, and the like, have all been
built for general use.
One of these libraries, jQuery, has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame, and deservedly
so. Why has it been so successful? It's because the focus of the library has been
on taking the really difficult (but important) JavaScript tools and making them
easy to use. Thus, in the words of its creators, jQuery is the "Write Less, Do More
JavaScript Library."
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This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Richard Ostheimer on 18th June 2009
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