jQuery

Last night I attended a great talk about jQuery given by Rod Paddock of Dashpoint Software. He was up from Austin, Texas and was a very entertaining speaker. Here's a summary of his talk.

This was part of the monthly speaker series organized by the .netBC Users Group. This time though it wasn't held at a BCIT facility but instead was at Microsoft's Richmond office. It's nowhere near as fancy as their Redmond head office but still was very nice.

I had never heard of jQuery prior to this talk. It's an open source Javascript library that abstracts software development to a higher level, thus making things easier and MUCH more straightforward. Quite frankly, Javascript development has been the bane of my life ever since I started building websites. I understand the basics but the freeform nature of it makes it very unwieldly. I've tried to learn more by looking at examples but there is so much spaghetti code out there that is purely dreadful. Oh sure, it might work, but how any other developer could take over such code would almost surely be a nightmare. This is something that a lot of younger developers don't think about much but is extremely important.

Another Javascript library that I have used extensively for some time is the AJAX Control Toolkit. It has served me well but it's clear now that Microsoft is going to be adopting jQuery big time so I'm committed to switching over all of my existing codebase to jQuery. It'll be a lot of work, but will be well worth it for the longterm!