Comments on: Moving from Prototype to JQuery http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2009/11/15/moving-from-prototype-to-jquery/ professional web development and consulting Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:56:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Brian http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2009/11/15/moving-from-prototype-to-jquery/comment-page-1/#comment-28099 Brian Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:00:11 +0000 http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/?p=111#comment-28099 @Robert: jQuery is difficult if you're not used to working with languages that support closures/anonymous functions. JavaScript does it in a way that's so close to Ruby that they're a natural fit. jQuery is a framework for DOM manipulation, and honestly, if you don't know how HTML, JavaScript, and the DOM work together, jQuery is going to seem insanely magical and full of maintenance nightmares. However, the reason jQuery is popular is for the same reason MVC frameworks are popular - separation of concerns. JavaScript does not belong in HTML. onclick, onblur, and onfocus attributes are just ugly, horrible, and wrong, and need to be applied as listeners unobtrusively rather than shoved into the code by a server-side html generation framework or IDE. jQuery makes it VERY simple to make that happen. Instead of putting onclick on each link, I can simply use jQuery and event delegation to watch a region of a page for clicks, then look at the event I capture and see what its target was. If it was a link, I can act on it. It actually greatly simplifies maintenance of sites for me. If you build things that display interfaces on the web, learn HTML, the DOM, and JavaScript. Once you've written your own AddEventListener function in Javacript that has to work in all browsers, you'll move to jQuery quickly. :) @Robert:

jQuery is difficult if you’re not used to working with languages that support closures/anonymous functions. JavaScript does it in a way that’s so close to Ruby that they’re a natural fit. jQuery is a framework for DOM manipulation, and honestly, if you don’t know how HTML, JavaScript, and the DOM work together, jQuery is going to seem insanely magical and full of maintenance nightmares. However, the reason jQuery is popular is for the same reason MVC frameworks are popular – separation of concerns. JavaScript does not belong in HTML. onclick, onblur, and onfocus attributes are just ugly, horrible, and wrong, and need to be applied as listeners unobtrusively rather than shoved into the code by a server-side html generation framework or IDE. jQuery makes it VERY simple to make that happen. Instead of putting onclick on each link, I can simply use jQuery and event delegation to watch a region of a page for clicks, then look at the event I capture and see what its target was. If it was a link, I can act on it. It actually greatly simplifies maintenance of sites for me.

If you build things that display interfaces on the web, learn HTML, the DOM, and JavaScript. Once you’ve written your own AddEventListener function in Javacript that has to work in all browsers, you’ll move to jQuery quickly. :)

]]> By: Robert Stackhouse http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2009/11/15/moving-from-prototype-to-jquery/comment-page-1/#comment-28095 Robert Stackhouse Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:35:28 +0000 http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/?p=111#comment-28095 I never quite understood the draw of JQuery until I watched a video of John Resig talking about JQuery. It became quite clear very quickly that JQuery is an opinionated framework. As a person who uses Rails, I'm sure you understand opinionated frameworks. In a talk by Scott Hanselman about ASP.NET MVC wherein he explains the differences between ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, he is careful to point out that the users of .NET Web Forms and .NET MVC value different things. The intersection of the things that Rails and .NET MVC value is pretty large. They both value model-view separation, convention over configuration, etc. The problem with JQuery is, for me at least, to discover what it values. Maybe no one comes right out and says it often enough. Maybe articles on JQuery tend to focus more on the how than the why. I was the student in Math class that annoyed the teacher and all the other students by asking why (often, "Why do we have to learn this?"—more often than not, I got the brush off rather than an answer). For me, to really get behind a framework, I've got to understand the why rather than just the how. I used to look at examples of JQuery code and think, "That's way to low-level," or, "That looks like function soup." I still think these things when looking JQuery code (probably because I'm used to writing object-oriented code), but now I understand there is a reason for this. JQuery folks are saying the only way to write JavaScript with an emphasis on minimalism, to reduce download times, and an emphasis on unobtrusiveness, to hopefully make pages more accessible. I have a concern about JQuery regarding maintenance programming. I worry about developers having to struggle to discover the intent of some JQuery code after not having touched it for an extended period of time (weeks or months). In other words, it doesn't seem, to me at least, that JQuery code lends itself to being self-documenting. I never quite understood the draw of JQuery until I watched a video of John Resig talking about JQuery. It became quite clear very quickly that JQuery is an opinionated framework. As a person who uses Rails, I’m sure you understand opinionated frameworks. In a talk by Scott Hanselman about ASP.NET MVC wherein he explains the differences between ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, he is careful to point out that the users of .NET Web Forms and .NET MVC value different things. The intersection of the things that Rails and .NET MVC value is pretty large. They both value model-view separation, convention over configuration, etc. The problem with JQuery is, for me at least, to discover what it values. Maybe no one comes right out and says it often enough. Maybe articles on JQuery tend to focus more on the how than the why. I was the student in Math class that annoyed the teacher and all the other students by asking why (often, “Why do we have to learn this?”—more often than not, I got the brush off rather than an answer).

For me, to really get behind a framework, I’ve got to understand the why rather than just the how.

I used to look at examples of JQuery code and think, “That’s way to low-level,” or, “That looks like function soup.” I still think these things when looking JQuery code (probably because I’m used to writing object-oriented code), but now I understand there is a reason for this. JQuery folks are saying the only way to write JavaScript with an emphasis on minimalism, to reduce download times, and an emphasis on unobtrusiveness, to hopefully make pages more accessible.

I have a concern about JQuery regarding maintenance programming. I worry about developers having to struggle to discover the intent of some JQuery code after not having touched it for an extended period of time (weeks or months). In other words, it doesn’t seem, to me at least, that JQuery code lends itself to being self-documenting.

]]> By: DL http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2009/11/15/moving-from-prototype-to-jquery/comment-page-1/#comment-27586 DL Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:44:59 +0000 http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/?p=111#comment-27586 I don't know if this treatment is related to your disability, but thought it might be worth a look if/when it's released: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/23/stem-cell-therapy-restores-british-mans-eyesight/ I don’t know if this treatment is related to your disability, but thought it might be worth a look if/when it’s released:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/23/stem-cell-therapy-restores-british-mans-eyesight/

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