The Distinctions Between jQuery and JavaScript

What Is the Difference Between jQuery and JavaScript?

jQuery is an easy-to-start framework for web developers. It simplifies DOM traversal and manipulation, event handling, CSS animation, and AJAX interactions.

Its unified API works across different browsers and reduces the need for code to accommodate different browser features. It also helps you avoid cross-browser compatibility issues.

jQuery has several pre-built functions that can add effects like sliding up or down, fading in and out, and text swoop-ins. These effects make your websites more visually appealing and improve user experience.

DOM manipulation

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an API that allows web developers to change the structure and style of a web page without refreshing it. The DOM is a representation of HTML and SVG documents, and a programming language like JavaScript can access it to manipulate the data.

There are many different ways to manipulate the DOM, but the most common methods use an element’s attributes and properties. For example, jQuery provides methods such as.attr(),.html(), and.val(), which act as getters and setters.

Using these methods, you can get the value of an attribute, remove an attribute, and even replace an entire group of elements. The DOM also contains other properties that can be used to manipulate the document’s layout and style. These include classList, which returns a list of space-separated CSS classes, and width and height, which return the size of an element. This is useful for displaying a tooltip, for example.

Event handling

Every web page needs to interact with its users, and this interaction is done via events. jQuery makes it easy to capture these events and use them to make the website interactive. This can be anything from clicking a button to a video playing or a scrolling box becoming visible.

There are two ways to register event handlers in jQuery: using addEventListener() and inline event handling. While both methods have their uses, addEventListener() is the more powerful method and scales best with larger programs.

Using inline event handling can lead to problems when multiple events are handled at the same time. For example, if an HTML element has a click event and a video event handler, the video will start to play before the click event is complete. This is known as event bubbling. jQuery has a function called stopPropagation() which can prevent this from happening. It can also be used to pass custom data to the event object.

Asynchronous programming

Although JavaScript is single-threaded, asynchronous programming makes it easy to program time-consuming functions without blocking the rest of your code. For example, if you want to load history and increase the font size simultaneously, you can do both using an asynchronous callback function. This function will run in a separate thread, which can continue to execute the rest of your code while waiting for communication to finish.

Unlike synchronous calls, async callback functions return a Promise object that can be resolved or rejected. You can then invoke higher-order functions on the promise object, such as .then(), which takes two callback functions, one for if the promise is resolved and the other for if it is rejected.

Using callbacks to integrate asynchronous behavior in JavaScript is simple but can result in complex and unwieldy logic, which has led to it being called “callback hell.” The more modern approach to handling async functions is to use Promise objects instead, which provide more control over asynchronous behavior than callbacks do.

Plugins

Plugins are a popular way to add functionality to jQuery. They enable web designers to create a variety of effects and functions for their websites. However, they can also lead to bloat. This is because they are geared toward broad appeal and can include features that your specific site may not need. For example, a carousel plugin might include responsive breakpoints or CSS3 transitions. Similarly, a layout plugin might have a lot of options that you might not need.

When writing a jQuery plugin, it is important to namespace your code. This can prevent your plugin from breaking if another script on the page uses the same namespace. In addition, it is a good idea to use a custom function instead of the $ function in order to avoid conflicting variable names. This will allow your plugin to be more easily integrated into an HTML page. It will also help you avoid code duplication. Finally, your plugin should come with unit tests.

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