jQuery — The Smart Alternative to Flash

We realize that title may not make much sense — jQuery, Flash? What are they? Let’s start with Flash. An Adobe software product intended for the web, Flash was especially used on websites to display video and highly detailed animations. While the animations were admittedly pretty slick, the problem was that traditional web developers and search engine companies really hated this technology. Then Apple came out with the iPhone and said: “We don’t do Flash.” Millions of iPhones later, Adobe’s product is not so popular anymore.

Plus, Flash is proprietary and expensive. Enter jQuery, an open source (and remember, that means free) web application that makes it easy to use JavaScript to do the same things that you do with Flash and lots more. There are thousands of plug-ins usable with jQuery and they can do everything from animations to banner sliders. Best of all, if we can’t find the jQuery plug-in that does the cool thing you need it to do, we can create the plug-in for you because the programming language is available to anyone.

That means that jQuery also handles plug-ins for accessing databases, running searches, sorting client-side information and much more. jQuery can do things your customer sees while caring for other tasks that take place “behind the scenes.” There are really very few limits to what sorts of applications jQuery can bring to your site.

If you need proof that jQuery is a great idea for your website, consider that Google is the world’s most popular website and they had this to say about jQuery:

We’re pleased to use jQuery, the wonderful open source JavaScript library, to help power each page.

If it’s good enough for Google, we think it’s even better for our clients.