Grokking JQuery: A useful editorial overview by Rick Strahl (and why you may like him beyond that)
Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.Folks interested in another take on jQuery may appreciate learning of this overview, jQuery Puts the Fun Back into Browser Scripting. The author does a great job of helping folks "grok" the tool at a high level. Now, it ends with some discussion of using it with .NET, but it's not enough to diminish the value for CFers. Indeed, just as the author notes that it can be used with or instead of ASP.NET ajax features, so the same is true with CF8 (and certainly for those using earlier releases of CF.) And of course, jQuery is about far more than just ajax.
If you've wondered what the hubub was about, give it a look. And if you want to read more about jQuery from the CF community's perspective, check out the blogs of folks like Ben Nadel, Rey Bango, and John Farrar, to name just a couple.
As for the article above, I'll add that the author is Rick Strahl, who, while not a CFer, has still been one of my favorite writers/bloggers over the years. Why? Well, first, he's just very thorough and a good communicator. But he also came from a Foxpro background and so his writing has often been (especially early on) from the same sort of "outside the camp" perspective that we CFers sometimes have. Admittedly, he's recently focused more on .NET and I know some CFers will just choke on that, but if you can look past it you may find nuggets of gold in his writing as I have. Besides the blog, he has a list of articles you can dig through, as well as some free tools which might be of value.
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I have been following Rick's blog for several years also. I have known him for about 12 years now, and was one of the original adopters of his VFP West Wind Web Connection framework back in early 1996, before moving to ColdFusion. He is quite a character and really knows his stuff.
You're spot on about the 'outside perspective'. As VFP developers we got the same lack of respect from the VB community at that time that CF gets from much of the rest of the web development community now.
As a jQuery user, I also am happy to see him active in that community.
BTW, another Microsoft person of interest who Rick's blog turned me on to, is Scott Hanselman. Also a .NET guy and now working for Microsoft, he is really driving the train for MVC in ASP.NET as well as exploring other dynamic languages on the .NET platform.
http://www.hanselman...
Jeff Fleitz
@Jeff, that's great to hear. I feared that Rick was too easily missed by folks in the CF community, so glad to hear of your connection to him. As for Scott, I'm a big fan of his as well. Love his podcast: http://www.hanselmin... Again, if CF people could forgive his focus on .NET and being a Microsoftie (albeit new after years outside), he often covers topics that are just as applicable to us as not.