Description:

Working on a large-scale site makes you look at jQuery a bit differently, and from that less common viewing angle you gain some interesting insights. I broke them down into what jQuery does for Digg, what it doesn't do, and my main takeaways from jQuery while writing DUI:

What it does for us:

• It scales with people / makes sense to non-JS devs. In the utopian future, a firm grasp of JS will be a basic skill for developers. For now though, you have a very small number of focused JS folks bringing everyone else up to speed. The curve between being a JS liability and someone who can write production UI code with jQuery is short and sweet, and that's absolutely essential when you have dozens of devs with only 2 JS guys.

What it doesn't do:

• It doesn't organize our code for us. I wrote DUI specifically to take care of that: We're large enough to require our own highly- organized code structure, but we're not Yahoo. jQuery remains agnostic in that regard, which is a good thing.

jQuery's influence on DUI:

• Sugar is good for you. Look at how jQuery chaining works, how its methods are laid out. It isn't elegant by accident, nor will your code be. Jump through a reasonable number of hoops if you have to -- it's worth the effort to have an API that rules.