It seems like every time I turn around, I have a project that reaches just beyond what SharePoint will do with out-of-the-box (OOB) functionality. And just about every time that happens, jQuery comes to the rescue to make the job easy, elegant, and robust.

Because SharePoint uses web technologies, we’re blessed with being able to use JavaScript to manipulate the presentation layer programmatically. One of the most popular JavaScript libraries today is called jQuery. jQuery gives us an easy way to manipulate the document object model (DOM) of the web pages created by SharePoint. This all happens in the browser after the page has been served up and rendered. But, it’s so fast, many of its features appear to happen on load. Others can be utilized with JavaScript to allow the page to change based on user interaction.