I’ve been working pretty insane hours lately, because I’m now working on three projects, of which one is a fulltime one. I’m enjoying it though. Ruby on Rails rocks, and it’s fun to be doing a lot of work on front end development again. One of the things I’ve actually been enjoying is Javascript development. The general consensus amongst J2EE developers seems to be that javascript is something that loosely resembles a real programming language like java, that it is useful to script hackers, and that implementing things on the server side is always better than in javascript. Especially if you want it to work in all browsers. I probably even made statements like that myself less than a year ago.

But after playing around with various javascript libraries like the google maps api, the yahoo UI library, prototype and scriptaculous for several months, I now beg to disagree with my former J2EE co-workers. Javascript is, in fact, a real programming language, and a really cool one too. The reason for my most recent excitement about javascript is actually jQuery. If you ever need to write any client side functionality for any site (and you probably do, if marketing is telling you that you need to start using Ajax, even though they don’t really know what that means), you owe it to yourself to check out jquery. Why is it so good? Because it allows you to keep your html markup nicely separated from your javascript code, because you will be able to write your functionality in half the amount of code of what you’d need if you weren’t using jquery, and because browser compatibility issues are a thing of the past with jquery. Props to John Resig for writing such a great library, and for the ever growing user community contributing jquery plugins and jquery based functionality. (Now the only thing that’s left on my wishlist is a tool or library that will make browser CSS compatibility issues a thing of the past too.)

Hopefully, I’ll be contributing to this jquery community myself too soon, since I’ve developed my own javascript library that ecommerce sites in particular may end up being very interested in. Stay tuned, more info to follow soon…