JQuery Developer Interview Preparation Guide

jQuery is a light weight JavaScript library which provides fast and easy way of HTML DOM traversing and manipulation,its event handling,its client side animations, etc. One of the greatest features of jQuery is that jQuery supports an efficient way to implement AJAX applications because of its light weight nature and make normalize and efficient web programs.

jQuery can be easily used with other libraries so it should work out of the box with simple and complex JavaScript and Ajax.

Download the latest jQuery library from jQuery.com and include the reference to the jQuery library file in our ASPX page.

<script src="_scripts/jQuery-1.2.6.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script language="javascript">

$(document).ready(function() {

alert('test');

});

</script>

Although it's a bit embarrassing, my first programming EXPERIENCE was trying to build a customized and skinnable mediaplayer with Visual Basic 6. This probably was around 1999 or so, and although the media player was quite nice in terms of features, it had countless timers and totally killed every CPU by just playing a simple song.

After this EXPERIMENT I soon realized that I wanted to do something with the internet. One of my hobbies was (and still is) japanese anime and manga, and there wasn't really a great community around it in germany at that time, so I took the challenge and created a community called Anime-Domain as my first big web project. It was my little playground, and after 10 revisions and designs it grew so popular that it was featured in german print magazines and had some 10k unique visitors a day. This was the time where I knew that by doing web development, you could reach many people very quickly with what you do, so I decided to continue to go that route.

I initially came to the jQuery project while searching for a good solution to power the web applications of a big german client. As I was specifically responsible for building out a lot of the frontend logic and interaction, I quickly found out about Interface, a collection of interface plugins developed by Stefan Petre. I soon realized there was a lot of work involved to make it stable for our environment, so I invested a lot of time into bugfixes and feature stabilization, and later even planned the next generation of Interface, Interface 2 with Stefan. However, it was then that Stefan moved on with founding his own business and ran out of time, so Interface was discontinued.

I would build the first version of an official jQuery interface addition, since I already had quite some EXPERIENCE from working on Interface. He and the jQuery community wanted to have it done in three months for the Ajax Experience conference in Boston, which was nearly impossible after a quick analysis of my workload. I had a day job, and I estimated I would need to work on it 3-4 hours everyday. After some days of consideration, I finally said 'yes', and for a three month period woke up every day at 6am to work for 3 hours on jQuery UI and then go to my day job. Now I can say that it was worth it.

Our test coverage is still incomplete, and with every fixed bug, we introduced 2 others, which made the arrival at a stable level extremely difficult. Every week, there were some 50-100 bugs entered in the bugtracker, and there was literally no end. Luckily, we were able to triage the bugs to critical and blockers and solve these in time for a release. You have to have a lot of guts to push out a release that's still imperfect - but an imperfect release is better than one that gets delayed for months. You can always roll out 1.7.1.

The one thing I'm most proud of is that our framework has matured so much since 1.5. We have taken great care to unify our API, fix hundreds of compatibility and behavior issues, and now we truly have a foundation to build upon without needing to rewrite the core functionality again and again. This will allow us to push our features in the next releases in literally no time.

Speaking for myself, I often release too early. That has been a problem in the past, when we released versions as stable that weren't, for instance. So it's important to find a combination of both - a stable release must be stable, while development cannot be halted or blocked through stubborn processes. A labs section is great in that way - it allows developers to contribute freely and plan on an open canvas, with early preview releases, and the work can later be merged back.

A lot of my side projects failed, as a matter of fact, while others succeeded. Usually, the reason why some project fails is not a technical one, but the fact that one didn't build meta data around it. That means a dedicated site, documentation, instructions.

I switched to Mac hardware around a year ago and I'm totally in love with it. All components work together nicely, and so far, I never had to return my Macbook Pro to the Apple Store because of an issue. However, I'm still using Windows through Parallels because OSX, while visually nice and stable, has fundamental usability flaws.

One of these flaws is the Finder. I recently worked on the jQuery UI Selectables in the labs version, and once again saw that the Finder had great flaws when it comes down to selection. For instance, if you select multiple items and click on one of them, the multiple selection isn't cleared. Also, my tools that I love for windows simply don't have an alternative yet.