I'm a HUGE advocate for the jQuery Ajax/Javascript library. It's lean, fast and VERY feature rich. Its on par with ANY JS lib out there. One of the big thinks lacking, at least from a ColdFusion perspective, was the ability to handle native CF data types and complex objects ala Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC.
Rob & I have been using jQuery for awhile now and even thrown out the possibility of making a version of AjaxCFC that uses jQuery under the hood. Well, Rob went off and actually did it!!! Today, Rob officially announced the AjaxCFC for jQuery Alpha Release. Yep, thats right! You can now leverage jQuery for your CF applications. To quote Rob:
“It's the same Ajax <-> CF integration you already know, but using the jQuery Ajax engine. It supports full JSON and WDDX serialization, has improved error handling, improved log4javascript integration, still supports named and unnamed arguments, and just so you can use it right away, it's back compatible with the DWR syntax.”
This is great news and truly validates jQuery's power and flexibility. For more info, jump over to Rob's blog.
For more info on jQuery, go here:
jQuery Ajax/Javascript library
jQuery Documentation
jQuery Tutorials
jQuery Plugins/Widgets
jQuery Demos
Learning jQuery Web Resource Center
Visual jQuery