Now that you are familiar with the app, let's see how to implement the home page of the app using jQuery. The assumption is that you are already experienced with jQuery, thus the purpose isn't to teach it, but rather to illustrate a standard implementation with what was considered the best framework for web developers for quite some time.
jQuery is a JavaScript library that enables developers to build multi-browser web apps that require some sort of client-side logic and manipulations. When jQuery entered the field, it certainly caused a great buzz. With it, developers could support various browsers quite easily. Moreover, standard and mundane client-side tasks that previously required some time to code have become a breeze with jQuery.
Breaking down jQuery, its key feature areas are the following:
- DOM selectors and manipulation fluent API
- Events
- Ajax and asynchrony
- Effects
Furthermore, jQuery is extensible through plugins. Actually, the ecosystem of plugins for jQuery is astonishing in size, there's nearly everything you're ever going to need to build modern apps.
Why do we need anything else then?
jQuery has certainly given us a lot, but it is not yet a productive framework that enables us to decompose our app into a real reusable and encapsulated components structure. Additionally, modern frameworks provide us with additional benefits such as optimized HTML DOM updates, data binding, and more.
Next, let's build the main functionality of the Everyday Market app homepage using jQuery.