Now, I know I am totally late to the party on this one, but how much does JQuery rock??

For several years now I have done all of my JS stuff using the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. I think they’re pretty awesome tools, and certainly being part of the standard Ruby on Rails package has helped them gain a lot of respect and usage.

Today I had to do a fairly complex piece of UI prototyping that involved a lot of complex JS. It took me about an hour to do it with Prototype, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with the results. Some of m fellow ZoeCity devs had been talking about JQuery for a new project we’ve just started, so I thought I’d give it a bash. 20 minutes later I had a functional better implementation, with less, neater looking code.

What About Rails?

As I’ve already mentioned, Rails ships with Prototype, so how do you go about using JQuery in these places? Enter JRails by aaronchi. This is a Rails plugin which replaces all the regular Prototype utilizing helpers with JQuery. Sorted!

JQuery is stupidly easy to learn, especially for anyone from an OOP background, so you should definitely give it a try on your next project.