Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

jQuery

The jQuery tagline is “write less, do more,” and the tagline is a perfect description of the jQuery experience. The API is terse, yet powerful. The library itself is flexible, yet lightweight. Best of all, jQuery supports all the modern browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome), and hides the inconsistencies (and bugs) you might experience if you wrote code directly against the API each browser provides. When you use jQuery, you'll not only be writing less code and finishing jobs in less time, you'll keep the hair on your head, too.

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in existence, and remains an open source project. You can find the latest downloads, documentation, and plugins on the jquery.com website. You can also find jQuery in your ASP.NET MVC application. Microsoft supports jQuery, and the project template for ASP.NET MVC will place all the files you need to use jQuery into a Scripts folder when you create a new MVC project.

As you'll see in this chapter, the MVC framework builds on top of jQuery to provide features like client-side validation and asynchronous postbacks. Before drilling into these ASP.NET MVC features, let's take a quick tour of the underlying jQuery features.

jQuery Features

jQuery excels at finding, traversing, and manipulating HTML elements inside an HTML document. Once you've found an element, jQuery also makes it easy to wire up event handlers on the element, animate the element, and build AJAX ...