That's fantastic news Michael - great to hear!
--John On 7/20/07, Michael Price <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all, Nothing like a good success story to warm the spirits before the weekend (as if the fact the working week is over didn't do that enough!) I first discovered jQuery a few months ago, when looking for an alternative to YUI - which is a great library and well documented, but a little large and awkward for my tastes. I ferget what stage jQ was at but it's entirely possible it hadn't reached version 1.0. Already I could see it's potential and power - CSS and XPath selectors, chainable functions, and only 20k for the packed version. I began to use it in small personal projects, eventually working my way up to a level of confidence in it's ability and my understanding of it that I began to use it on client's websites here. I can't claim to be a JavaScript expert but with jQuery, I didn't have to be. Over the last few months I have used jQuery to handle AJAX work such as adding products to a shopping cart in the background, and combined it with plugins like tabs, validation, accordion, modal windows and just about everything in the interface library. Websites I work on bounce, fade, slide, pop up confirmations much nicer than your average alert() and confirm() and generally wow our clients with the effects I've been able to pull off. And - most important of all - the sites work perfectly with JavaScript turned off. Soon, I hope to be able to show you a booking system I've been working on which blew our client's socks off. And an e-commerce site which did the same. There's always been a problem though - I'm the only one in the office truly sold on jQuery. A colleague of mine recently saw some code I'd done and decided it looked simple enough to try at home. Over a weekend he'd redesigned his football website to have drag and drop player positioning, AJAX star ratings for players, and rounded-off corners on his DIVs - and this with no prior jQuery knowledge other than what he'd seen me produce. The problem still existed that if a JavaScript fix to one of my works was required I was generally the only one who could do it. No more! In this morning's annual review I told my bosses how much I loved jQuery and how it had made keeping up with my ever increasing workload so much easier. JavaScript now took minutes, not hours, and went further and was more compatible than it would've ever been without jQuery running under the hood. Convinced by my arguments and eulogising, I've now been given the job of teaching all of my colleagues the art of jQuery in the hope that we as a company can standardise on it for all present and future projects! We're only a small company but I'm really pleased to be able to take my enthusiasm for jQuery forward and have it power all of our websites - there really isn't a better library or community for us to be relying on. Thank you to John, or anyone else who works directly with the project and every single person who's ever written a plug-in I've used or answered a question I've asked. Our clients love you - but they don't know it. :) Regards, Michael Price
