Experimenting with jQuery

Today I concluded a little exploration journey through jQuery.

I already had some experience with Prototype (and Script.aculo.us, building the website of the Portuguese Museum of Ancient Art), so I had some expectations regarding jQuery. I have to admit that jQuery blew them away quite easily.

jQuery is more intuitive than Prototype in many aspects, allows developers to do more with less coding and already contains many effects that can be found in Script.aculo.us. The documentation is very complete (including useful examples) and, of course, supports plugins and provides AJAX to your applications.

The main advantage is precisely its "querying" abilities: it's very easy to find multiple elements on the DOM and manipulate them in various ways (including attributes and CSS). jQuery supports CSS expressions, XPath expressions and even some custom expressions (for example, to select all even nodes that match some expression).

To experiment with jQuery, I picked up something I did some time ago and turned it into what is now known as the Timetable Combinator :)

I'm sorry, I opened it with IE, Opera and Safari for Windows but I think it only works in Firefox. I think it wouldn't be too hard to cross-browserize it, but I don't have the time. If you want to take it to the next level, drop me a line.