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I was conversing with a fellow coder last night and jQuery came up - he had never come across jTemplates or ever considered something like it may exist...

It got me thinking - how many other incredibly useful features exist in jQuery that aren't being used because perfectly serviceable alternatives exist?

I am hoping this question doesn't get closed - I'm aware it doesn't follow the modern Stack-Overflow QA paradigm, but I think it could form a useful resource and questions like this used to be common, so C#, javascript etc have similar offerings.

I'll start with the obvious:

  • Selectors Need I say more?

  • Appearance Modifiers - Various visual effects that can easily be applied to DOM elements. See here.

  • jQuery UI particularly useful in conjunction with the ThemeRoller. Also many widgets and interactions. So far, I've only used the Dialogue and Slider controls, both performing excellently. See here.

  • .ajax and it's variants (.get(), .load() etc.) - Takes all the pain out of making ajax requests. See here.

  • .live Attach an event handler to all elements matching the selector now and in the future! Genius! See here.

  • jTemplates - Alternative to the jQuery.tmpl() function, this plugin allows you to create powerful html templates for rendering data client-side. See here.

  • qTip2 - Still officially in beta, but this plugin is simply the best for creating tooltips and much much more. See here.

  • Deferred - A clean and sensible way to manage asynchronous code. See here for basic info and further links.

Please add anything I've missed, and I will update my list accordingly.

Community
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BonyT
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  • $.hide, $.show, $.animate, $.css - all the appearance modifiers. – rickyduck Aug 03 '11 at 10:11
  • Possibly related: [Hidden (or not widely known) features of jQuery](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/121965/hidden-or-not-widely-known-features-of-jquery) – jensgram Aug 03 '11 at 10:19
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    This seems more like a jQuery circlejerk than a proper, specific question. – Delan Azabani Aug 03 '11 at 10:25
  • @jensgram - I found that article, but it looked like it was aiming at identifying obscure jQuery functions, as opposed to this which is about the ones everyone SHOULD know about. – BonyT Aug 03 '11 at 10:26
  • @BonyT Oh, you may be right. However, I guess you will run into trouble defining "should" :) I've never seen jTemplates before but have used `.tmpl()` to some extent. – jensgram Aug 03 '11 at 10:31
  • I'm trying to create something like this (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c) for jquery. – BonyT Aug 03 '11 at 10:37
  • @Delan and everyone who agrees with his comment - would you consider the C# and javascript topics cited above similarly? If not, then how is this post different?? – BonyT Aug 03 '11 at 12:47

2 Answers2

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Chaining
Makes it beautiful (with room for making it a mess, though) and concise. Almost every jQuery method (including plugins) return a jQuery object for chaining unless a better alternative exists (e.g., the dimension methods etc.)

jensgram
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0

ValidationEngine: Really awesome, easy validations!!

Info!

Kiko_L
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