In Defense of jQuery

Not that it doesn't stand up on its own right, but I have to throw my $0.02 in.

I came across this article on 'why mootools and not jquery' from Julio Capote in my feed this morning.

I'm going to do a point by point here.

1. Classes: "Eventually you'll want real classes to structure your UI logic". While This is what you want, the better I get at jQuery the more I use chaining. I also lean toward functional programming and not OO programming, so...yeah. I'm just saying that this isn't necessarily a global drawback as much as a design choice.
2. Learning Curve: I buy that learning jQuery takes a bit of practice, but again, I see it as a preference thing, because before jQuery, to me 'regular javascript' just wasn't that good
3. Speed: jQuery IS faster.
4. Animations: I don't do animations much.. but in my experience jQuery's have been...sufficient. Moo Tools animations do look pretty good
5. New Element Creation: Making a new element _is_ easy: $("<a href='http://www.servee.com'>done</a>");
6. Modularity: Mootools is modular..you can get the libraries you need: You can do this with jquery from SVN...but when the whole library is 12kbs I think it's really unnecessary.
7. The Documentation: I've never checked out the mootools documentation, My experience with jQuery doc has been very good, and my experience with the #jquery on irc.freenode.net has been very good as well
8. Extensibility: I haven't done anything outside of 'basic usage' with mootools, but jquery isn't an 'unintelligible mess' by any means.
9. Namespace vs Prototype: Yeah, this is just preference, but unobtrusive (Namespace/jQuery) is worth it, especially if you have to have two versions of the same library on a page.
10. Final: I for one welcome our new namespaced overlords.

11th January 2009