Introducing the jQuery framework

jQuery (http://learn.jquery.com/) is a cross-platform JavaScript framework for client-side web application development. It is a survivor from the original AJAX craze from 2004 and 2005, where it was and still is competing with Prototype (http://prototypejs.org/) and Scriptaculous (http://script.aculo.us/). jQuery has been called the equivalent of what the Java Collections framework did for the Java programming language. According to Wikipedia, jQuery is 70 percent of the 10,000 most visited websites in the world. In other words, it is the first JavaScript framework that really caught the attention of the developers and caused them to rethink the furthest capabilities of the underlying language. jQuery is free and provided under the MIT open source license.

jQuery was built to make the manipulation of the Document Object Model (DOM) easier and apply CSS to the HTML elements. In jQuery, there is a secret sauce called Sizzle, which is a selector engine that traverses...