What is the difference between JavaScript and jQuery?

Over the last decade, front-end development has evolved significantly. It is no longer as easy as it once was to develop a front-end web application. It is easy to find several front-end frameworks and libraries these days.

Previously, developers created an interactive front-end web application with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They eventually realized it was not a long-term solution for such a large and highly complex project. Developers created Front-end frameworks as reliable tools for constructing stable, sophisticated front-end applications.

Front-end technology is rapidly growing, owing mostly to the creation of open-source tools, frameworks, and libraries. jQuery is one such popular open-source library.

In this tutorial, we will look at the jQuery library and the fundamental distinctions between JavaScript and jQuery. We’ll look at several helpful jQuery capabilities and how it simplifies the building of front-end apps as compared to JavaScript.

What is JavaScript?

In 1995, Brendan Eich invented JavaScript, a dynamically typed scripting language. Its major goal was to improve the user experience by making webpages more dynamic and interactive for the Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript has evolved much since then. From being primarily used for scripting to being the most versatile and well-liked programming language ever.

We now utilize it in a variety of software domains, including web development, mobile application development, desktop applications, machine learning, and so on. It is updated frequently and adapted to incorporate all of the new features required in a modern programming language.

What is jQuery?

When JavaScript was first made accessible to the public, many firms began to release browsers that included their own version of JavaScript. It was a headache for developers since they had to guarantee that the application was compatible with all major browsers. To overcome this issue, ECMA’s Technical Committee TC39 standardized JavaScript as ECMAScript and included it in the ECMA-262 specification as ECMAScript.

Although JavaScript standardization has improved, there are still significant implementation inconsistencies. To address this issue, developers produced a number of libraries. However, most users used jQuery.

John Resig released jQuery in 2006. Everything began as a collection of separate tools for dealing with DOM interactions, but John ultimately consolidated it into a single jQuery library to solve browser incompatibility issues.

The library was a tremendous hit because it made constructing front-end web apps straightforward. Because of its ease of use and quick development time, Developers still employ jQuery for small to medium-sized projects today.

Advantages of jQuery

jQuery facilitates HTML page traversal, event handling, animation, and Ajax interactions for speedy web development. When compared to JavaScript and its other JavaScript libraries, jQuery is easier to use. When compared to JavaScript, jQuery requires fewer lines of code. Using jQuery over native JavaScript has many advantages, such as:

1. Browser compatibility: we can build code that works across browsers without needing to learn the specifics of each.
2. Strong open-source ecosystem – we get to enjoy many plugins available to speed up application development.
3. Excellent documentation and guides – The jQuery website contains a wealth of lessons that are essential for newcomers.
4. It eliminates the need to write repetitive and complicated loops, DOM scripts, and API calls.

Differences between JavaScript and jQuery

Because jQuery is nothing more than a JavaScript library, it cannot replace JavaScript. Although all jQuery code is JavaScript, jQuery does not include all JavaScript code. One thing you should know is that they are not two programming languages; rather, they are both JavaScript. John Resig designed jQuery to do common scripting operations with fewer lines of code. Let’s discuss where native JavaScript differs from jQuery.

Functioning

Even though the name implies that the two concepts are linked, they are not. While JavaScript is a high-level interpreted programming language, jQuery is a cross-platform scripting library that leverages JavaScript syntaxes to increase web browser interactivity.

Purpose of use

JavaScript and jQuery both serve the same purpose: to make the developer’s job as easy as possible. jQuery is a relatively efficient and user-friendly library that simplifies complicated tasks with only a few lines of code, whereas raw JavaScript takes many lines of code.

Performance

Plain JavaScript will be found to be quicker than jQuery. However, when the logic becomes more sophisticated, jQuery outperforms JavaScript. JavaScript code becomes too time-consuming for complicated reasoning. It might be one of the reasons why JavaScript performs very poorly when it comes to sophisticated tasks. In this case, jQuery is the best solution.

But, to get the most out of jQuery, we’ll need a thorough grasp of JavaScript syntax. jQuery is a JavaScript framework that cannot exist on its own. In reality, it makes extensive use of JavaScript features to make things easier while handling DOM.

Features

JavaScript is an important part of client-side web development and is used extensively in server-side applications. However, we utilize jQuery solely on the client side. However, it has brought several new JavaScript features to the attention of developers.

jQuery, on the other hand, makes it easy for developers to complete several jobs. jQuery is light, fast, and feature-rich, making event management, animation, HTML page traversal, and Ajax handling far easier than with basic JavaScript.

Maintainability

JavaScript code is frequently verbose, making it difficult to maintain and reuse. jQuery, on the other hand, has fewer lines of code and is easy to maintain because all we have to do is use its preset methods. It also enables us to reuse jQuery functions across our code.

Compatibility

In JavaScript, we may need to handle cross-browser compatibility by writing extra code or developing an alternative. We don’t have to worry about writing any workarounds or extra code in jQuery to make our code browser-friendly.

Handling user events and API calls

We can create features and functionality, manage events, and perform API requests in JavaScript, but we may have to write a lot of code. jQuery makes it easy to add interactivity, animations, and API requests thanks to the library’s predefined methods. We just call those functions at the appropriate places in our code.

Conclusion

While both JavaScript and jQuery have many similarities in terms of functionality and features, they are vastly different in many respects. While JavaScript is a standalone programming language, jQuery is a JavaScript library that works across platforms. We may conclude that jQuery is sufficient for the majority of web development projects, but certain specific initiatives may demand explicit JavaScript language. Both are equally important in web development.

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