Why jQuery?

·        It’s open source, and the project is licensed under an MIT and a GNU General Public License (GPL)     license.

·        It’s small (18 KB minified) and zipped (114 KB, uncompressed).

·    It’s incredibly popular, which is to say it has a large community of users and a healthy amount of contributors who participate as developers and evangelists.

·        It normalizes the differences between web browsers so that you don’t have to.

·        It’s intentionally a lightweight footprint with a simple yet clever plugin architecture.

·        Its repository of plugins is vast and has seen steady growth since jQuery’s release.

·        Its API is fully documented, including inline code examples, which in the world of JavaScript libraries is a luxury. Heck, any documentation at all was a luxury for years.

·        It’s friendly, which is to say it provides helpful ways to avoid conflicts with other JavaScript libraries.

·     Its community support is actually fairly useful, including several mailing lists, IRC channels, and a freakishly insane amount of tutorials, articles, and blog posts from the jQuery community.

·        It’s openly developed, which means anyone can contribute bug fixes, enhancements, and development help.

·        Its development is steady and consistent, which is to say the development team is not afraid of releasing updates.

·        Its adoption by large organizations has and will continue to breed longevity and stability (e.g., Microsoft, Dell, Bank of America, Digg, CBS, Netflix).

·        It’s incorporating specifications from the W3C before the browsers do. As an example, jQuery supports a good majority of the CSS3 selectors.

·        It’s currently tested and optimized for development on modern browsers (Chrome 1, Chrome Nightly, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, Opera 9.6, Safari 3.2, WebKit Nightly, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Firefox Nightly).

·        It’s downright powerful in the hands of designer types as well as programmers. jQuery does not discriminate.

·        Its elegance, methodologies, and philosophy of changing the way JavaScript is written is becoming a standard in and of itself. Consider just how many other solutions have borrowed the selector and chaining patterns.

·        Its unexplainable by-product of feel-good programming is contagious and certainly unavoidable; even the critics seem to fall in love with aspects of jQuery.

·        Its documentation has many outlets (e.g., API browser, dashboard apps, cheat sheets) including an offline API browser (AIR application).

·        It’s purposely bent to facilitate unobtrusive JavaScript practices.

·        It has remained a JavaScript library (as opposed to a framework) at heart while at the same time providing a sister project for user interface widgets and application development (jQuery UI).

·        Its learning curve is approachable because it builds upon concepts that most developers and designers already understand (e.g., CSS and HTML).