What is jQuery?

 What is jQuery?

jQuery is a classic JavaScript library that’s fast, light-weight, and feature-rich. It was built in 2006 by John Resig at BarCamp NYC. jQuery is free and open-source software with a license from MIT.

It makes things simpler for HTML document manipulation and traversal, animation, event handling, and Ajax.

According to W3Techs, 77.6% of all sites use jQuery (as of 23rd February 2021).

Features/Benefits:

It has an easy-to-use, minimalistic API.

It uses CSS3 selectors in manipulating style properties and finding elements.

jQuery is lightweight, taking just 30 kb to gzip and minify, and supports an AMD module.

As its syntax is quite similar to that of CSS, it is easy for beginners to learn.

Extendable with plugins.

Versatility with an API that supports multiple browsers, including Chrome and Firefox.

Use cases:

DOM manipulation with CSS selectors that use certain criteria to select a node in the 

DOM. These criteria include element names and their attributes (like class and id).

Element selection in DOM using Sizzle (an open-source, multi-browser selector engine).

Creating effects, events, and animations.

JSON parsing.

Ajax application development.

Feature detection.

Control of asynchronous processing with Promise and Deferred objects.