What is jQuery?
jQuery is fast, small, lightweight, brief but comprehensive JavaScript library created by John Resig in January 2006. The main objective of creating jQuery is to Write less, do more. jQuery makes things easy or simple to understand like HTML document traversing, manipulation, animating, event handling and AJAX calls. It allows to create dynamic web applications and web pages.
Following are the Main Features of jQuery
- HTML/DOM manipulation: jQuery simplifies the syntax for manipulating and selecting the DOM elements and HTML documents traversing.
- Utility function like features detection.
- Event handling: jQuery offers several simple and effective ways to represent number of events.
- Animations: jQuery offers a number of built-in features for animation which can be used for creating animation effects on your website.
- Browser support: jQuery is supported by all modern browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox.
- AJAX support: Using AJAX jQuery methods you can directly load external data into selected HTML elements of your web page.
- Lightweight: jQuery is a lightweight library which can be easily used and zipped.
- jQuery supports CSS3 selectors and XPath Syntax also.
What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is an object oriented computer programming which is used to create interactive web pages. It is open and cross-platform language designed for creating network centric applications.
Main Features of JavaScript
- Lightweight: It is very lightweight programming language designed to create web based applications.
- Rich interfaces: Using JavaScript, you can add items like sliders and drag and drop
- Client side Scripting language: Client-side Scripting language means client browsers execute it locally, program run in a web browser of a client’s computers.
- Case sensitive: JavaScript is a case sensitive language which means that all function names, keywords, variables and identifiers must be typed with a capitalization of letters.
- Object oriented: JavaScript offers a number of small built in objects like date, string, array etc.
- Validating user’s input: JavaScript offers ways to validate the user’s data via two basic function i.e. basic validation (to make sure that all the mandatory fields are filled in) and data form validation (to check the correct form and value entered).
- Other features like functions, methods, loops, variables, arrays, operators and objects.
Points that Differentiate jQuery and JavaScript
Existence
JavaScript is a programming language that allows to make everything like data structures, loops and functions and works with all web browsers while jQuery is a framework of JavaScript, it is a feature rich JavaScript library that makes things simple like HTML document traversal, manipulations, event handling and animating. jQuery exists because of JavaScript; it cannot exist on its own but both serve different purposes.
Combination
JavaScript is a scripting language which is a combination of ECMA script programming language, Document Object Model (DOM) and access for web browser windows. On the other hand, jQuery has Document Object Model (DOM).
Time
Using JavaScript, you have to write your own script which may consume more time, but Using jQuery consumes less time or saves time, you need not to write much script because it already exists in JavaScript library.
Language/Framework
JavaScript is a scripting language which works on almost all browsers, while jQuery is a framework, which is fast, concise JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document.
Animations
If you want to create animation, you should use jQuery because creating animations using jQuery are simple, fast and possible, but animations are not possible using JavaScript.
Web Based Application Creation
Creating web based application in JavaScript is a long process because of unstructured code that creates so many problems to validate HTML source of a web page. In jQuery creating web based application is very simple and easy to understand.
Browser Support
Browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer support jQuery whereas JavaScript is supported by all major browsers.
Relation Between JavaScript and jQuery
JavaScript and jQuery both are same thing, jQuery is a feature-rich JavaScript library which has been created to simplify the HTML documents traversing, animation, AJAX interactions and event handling and make easy to use API that works from one browser to others.
Conclusion
At the end, we have concluded that both languages can be used to create same effects and both have advantages over each other. For some projects jQuery is better over JavaScript and vice-versa, we can’t say which one is much better. Using JavaScript all the time can slow down the completion time of your project whereas using jQuery can do it with fewer lines of code. jQuery is fast and concise and JavaScript simplifies HTML documents so both have their roles and you can use any of them.
