Geesh... I haven't written anything in a while (well anything that isn't code). And I still don't have much to say except that a new version of jQuery has been released. jQuery 1.4 is sporting some serious performace enhancements not to mention that their API site has been completely rewritten.
I highly suggest checking it out.
I’m curious why jQuery has become so popular. My guess is that it has a fairly easy learning curve for noobies who really don’t want to know how something works, they just want some easy way to add glitz and be done with it. I’ve been using YUI2 for years now. Interestingly, jQuery is much slower than YUI or Dojo. Any thoughts?
If jQuery’s ease of use is tantamount to “a fairly easy learning curve for noobies”, are you suggesting that YUI and Dojo are overly-complicated frameworks that only a seasoned programmer could tackle? jQuery is popular because they’ve managed to pull off something that is actually quite difficult to accomplish when designing a framework; making it easy to use.
On the other hand, jQuery as a framework is not perfect. I feel that it is lacking much of the enhancements that extend the functionality to the JavaScript language (like as much of Prototype does). However, I have found one library that looks promising called Underscore. The developer describes it as “the tie to go along with jQuery’s tux” and it may fill in what I’ve felt has been missing in jQuery.