“Created by John Resig in 2006, jQuery is the mother of all JavaScript frameworks. By far, it is the most-used framework in production, as you can see at http://libscore.com/#libs. The most important feature of jQuery is its famous JQuery selector syntax: var element = $('.my-class'). It may seem useless today but you have to consider that in 2006, browsers were not aligned as they are today. This is the real value that jQuery brought to the front-end world. jQuery created a lingua franca between the browsers. It helped the community to grow around a common ground. In addition to the selector syntax, a lot of features were added to the core project, such as AJAX requests, JQuery animations, and other utilities. It rapidly became the Swiss Army knife of front-end development. jQuery has an official UIKit called jQueryUI, which is easily pluggable, and so the web is full of plugins for every need. Today, front-end developers tend to joke about jQuery, but it’s been a cornerstone of modern web development.”
jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animations, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. As of August 2022, jQuery is used by 77% of the 10 million most popular websites. Web analysis indicates that it is the most widely deployed JavaScript library by a large margin, having at least three to four times more usage than any other JavaScript library.
jQuery's syntax is designed to make it easier to navigate a document, select DOM elements, create animations, handle events, and develop Ajax applications. jQuery also provides capabilities for developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. This enables developers to create abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, theme-able widgets. The modular approach to the jQuery library allows the creation of powerful dynamic web pages and Web applications.
The set of jQuery core features—DOM element selections, traversal, and manipulation—enabled by its selector engine (named "Sizzle" from v1.3), created a new "programming style", fusing algorithms and DOM data structures. This style influenced the architecture of other JavaScript frameworks like YUI v3 and Dojo, later stimulating the creation of the standard Selectors API.
Microsoft and Nokia bundle jQuery on their platforms. Microsoft includes it with Visual Studio for use within Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET MVC frameworks while Nokia has integrated it into the Web Run-Time widget development platform.