jQuery a great tool for any ServerSide Scripting Language

From the 2008 archives — my first impressions of jQuery, lightly updated with notes on where things stand today.

One of the most used frameworks for making your web application more alive and interactive. It had been a while since I first ran into it, but I finally decided to use it. The main reason: seeing the sites that actually use jQuery — take a look at the list and you’ll be surprised by the big company names.

There were limitations back then. LightBox2 — the old image-overlay script — got a jQuery-flavored equivalent in Thickbox (a plugin for the jQuery framework). And there was a documented workaround for running jQuery alongside other JS frameworks that claimed the $ shortcut. One more practical gotcha: if you decided to use some of its DHTML goodies, in many cases the plugins required a global * { margin: 0; padding: 0 } reset to render correctly. If you were one of those CSS gurus who already did that, no issue.

Back then there were learning resources like “15 days of jQuery” with nice demonstrations, plus ever-growing plugin lists. These sites are gone now, but the docs at api.jquery.com remain excellent.

The browser-support matrix of 2008

jQuery officially supported these browsers at the time:

• Firefox 1.5+
• Internet Explorer 6+
• Safari 2.0.2+
• Opera 9+

Any problem with them should be considered and reported as a bug in jQuery. Known problem browsers included Firefox 1.0.x, Internet Explorers 1–5.x, Safari 1.x and 2.0, Opera 1.0–8.5, and Konqueror. Anyone who has since had to support IE6 will remember exactly why that matrix mattered.

jQuery UI demos

Some demonstrations of jQuery UI as it looked at the time:

• Mouse interaction: Draggables, Droppables, Sortables, Selectables, Resizables
• User interface extensions: Accordion, Datepicker, Dialog, Slider, Tablesorter, Tabs
• Effects: Shadow, Magnifier

Where jQuery stands now

Writing this from 2026: jQuery is no longer the default choice for new work — React, Vue, and friends took over interactive UIs, and the language itself absorbed most of what we needed jQuery for (query selectors, fetch, class manipulation). But it is far from dead: it’s now part of the OpenJS Foundation, it still runs on a huge share of the web, and it remains a perfectly sane tool when you just need progressive enhancement on a server-rendered page. The original point stands — a great tool for any server-side language, then and now.