AS > jQuery
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- dbloc
I hate to say it, but I'm kinda glad the iPhone/iPad flash scenario happened. It has forced me to expand my abilities with jQuery/javascript. Although flash has way more power, jQuery is fun to work with..
- canuck0
Amen bro.
- duhsign0
right there with you, jquery sounds cooler, flash sounds like 2002
- Boz0
yes.. JQuery is actually the savior of JS.. if it wasn't for jQuery nothing we see today would have happened.
And btw, it's very easy to learn and has stuff like Jquery transitions and JQuery equations (by Penner as well) that allow you to achieve similar tween animations..
However, they run much worse than Flash because DOM really can't handle a lot of JS by being CPU bound.. and unless you use canvas with HTML5, a lot of the new improvements with browsers won't really give much benefit in terms of speed.
So in the end, for a lot of stuff, animations you most likely won't be using JQuery a lot and you will be using Webkit CSS transforms that are somewhat hardware accelerated and have much better performance, especially when you move divs across the whole screen etc.
But it is very helpful and good.. And as I said, AS people can pick it up.. unfortunately JS/JQuery is still at the level of AS2 really, but it's really the best we have for HTML stuff and not really that bad.. you can do a lot of stuff with it.. you'll just hit some walls with performance if you don't plan stuff nicely and try to do too many things at once.
- mootools is cool, prototype.js is cool, there's a bunch of cool stuff out there....vaxorcist
- rounce0
Although jQuery teaches you some bad JS habits...
- vaxorcist0
The best thing about jquery and similar (prototype.js,etc) is that you're no longer in browser-version-testing hell, which used to be the bane of the javascript programmers existence....
...once upon a time... that's sometimes why we chose flash over javascript in the past, as we could trust that flash stuff worked in flash player more easily than which javascript stuff worked in which browser and the infinite number of if/else statements from hell we had to kludge-up our code with....
- fyoucher10
I've been interested in learning JQ/JS. How hard was it to learn that coming from AS? What would be the main differences to get used to?
- Boz0
@vaxorcist I totally agree, however I think that browser issues and compatibilities still exist.. Flash still has a huge advantage in that regard because runtime takes you completely out of that hell.
It got better on JS side but we still have to work with CSS differences in addition to other small incompatibilities among browsers, including font management and how they look like on OSX, on Windows etc..
There are solutions to those issues but it's still dealing with other frameworks, relying on bridging code and 3rd party involvement to try to compensate for that inefficiency. But this is really not JQuery issue I guess as much.
I'll say though.. I like jQuery.. it made JS nightmare manageable and now it's actually a joy for many things to code.
- yes,. there are still issues, but so much cleaner code these days...vaxorcist
- Boz0
fyoucher1,
you can pick it up in like a day dude.. read through a book and you'll realize how the whole framework works.. JQuery has access to the whole dom and can cycle through tags or deal with groups of tags at once, it can directly access and manipulate CSS and so much more.. It's really powerful..
The model is very similar to the movieClip.movieClip.button.myFun... thing in AS for example.
Once you get how JQuery it's super easy without any worries we had to do before with getElementByID shit and so on. It's way more powerful and easy to use. Less code too.
What AS are you coming from? If you are coming from AS/AS2 it won't be too hard, if you are coming from AS3 (that means you already went through AS1/2 and then went completely OOP in AS3) it will be a piece of cake.
- AS1/AS2. Through 450 pages of 900 of the AS3 Book from Moock.fyoucher1
- Boz0
it should be easy dude.. you'll see how awesome JQuery is..
My suggestion is for you to get these 2 books:
WordPress 3.0.jQuery Sep. 2010 (that one actually has very nice dealing with JQuery but will also help you understand Wordpress loop)The other book is:
JQuery Novice to Ninja - Feb. 2010You should be able to download them here:
http://www.wowebook.com/
- dbloc0
Thanks Boz!
Direct Links for the 2 books mentioned:
http://www.wowebook.com/open-sou…
http://www.wowebook.com/javascri…
- dasmeteor0
I have the same impression jQuery looks like AS2.
Strange feeling that I am going back in the days.
Not strict at all.
- section_0140
jquery is the best. It's easy as shit to use and has a huge library of things that you want to do. Whether or not one is better than the other totally depends on the application. Tons of complex animations, go for flash. Basic animations and ajax business, jquery by a mile.
- vaxorcist0
The most important thing about jquery is that it makes is much more predictable to guess when something will be completed and debugged.... before jQuery, I drove a few of my managers nuts I'm sure....