Help me choose between Javascript, jQuery, or AJAX.

Question

Hi there, before i start of with anything i know that jQuery and Ajax are the JS frameworks and it is nothing but JavaScript itself. I started to learn Javascript few days ago, and then i realized the need to learn the AJAX and then suddenly i felt jQuery will be the better solution, heck i am confused here, i cannot go three at a time nor do i want to master all the three.

i am a web designer, i know, HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, i started to learn JavaScript on the purpose of learning the client side validations or some sort of animations for the website, i need the suggestion from the web gurus, i really don't want to get into the complex java script programming right now, all i want is the simple solution for performing various tasks like validation, and animation for my websites. is jQuery feasible solution for my problem? can i learn jQuery without much prior experience in Javascript. ?

Answer 1

• JavaScript is a programming language.
• Ajax is a thing you can do with that language.
• jQuery is a library that does some heavy lifting in that language for you (including some things relating to Ajax)

You can't choose between them, it doesn't make sense.

is jQuery feasible solution for my problem?

Yes

can i learn jQuery without much prior experience in Javascript. ?

Yes, but you should get a decent understanding of JavaScript and DOM so you know what the library is trying to achieve. Otherwise you are poking around in the dark and won't produce as good results.

It is also very wise to understand progressive enhancement.

Answer 2

jQuery makes javascript and ajax easy.

My advise: Learn jQuery

Answer 3

Normally I don't say this, but a better solution for you would be to look at jQuery. It is a framework written in JavaScript to make various tasks simpler and cross-browser. AJAX is nothing but just a function - XMLHttpRequest.

Since you don't want to delve deeper into the JavaScript language, the list of existing plugins available for jQuery will be helpful for you.

To understand where things stand in the spectrum

• JavaScript is the language
• AJAX or XMLHttpRequest is a function available in JavaScript.
• jQuery is a framework written in JavaScript to simplify things

Answer 4

Firstly, JQuery is a AJAX library. AJAX is doing the communication manually on a lower level where as JQuery wraps in a higher level library.

Having done not much JQuery myself, I'm not entirely sure but I think you can achieve validation (and maybe animation) quicker by using inbuilt systems from JQuery, the alternative is to write it from scratch in javascript.

Although from the sounds of it if you want pure clientside animation or clientside validation there should be no need to use AJAX or JQuery. I'm not too certain about other libraries you could use for quick development.

My advice would be to learn javascript and keep an eye on whether any parts of JQuery can do exactly what you want it to do.

For example :

http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/jquery/form_validation/

Show's you how use JQuery to validate inputs in a rule based system (It looks almost like an extension of CSS)