jQuery

jQuery describes a platform-independent framework for the JavaScriptscripting language, which is available as open source software. In concrete terms, jQuery implements an extensive class library that simplifies access to the Document Object Model( DOM). The library developed by John Reisig is available in December 2009 in version 1.3.4. In addition to a generally wide distribution, jQuery is used in both the Visual Studio development environment and Nokia's web runtime platform, among others, due to its performant coding. The use of jQuery significantly reduces the code effort of JavaScript applications.

The DOM manipulation and navigation features provided by jQuery greatly simplify browsing and manipulation, event handling, Ajax interaction, and HTML pageanimation.

jQuery supports this through a so-called "selector" API (Programming Application Interface), which allows querying HTML elements using selectors and then applying appropriate commands to them. A property of the commands is that they can be chained. This chaining of calls is also called invocation chaining, so that the result of a command can also be passed on to other, following commands. jQuery also includes a number of APIs for the animation of HTML pages.