Subtitles of the Movie

In this tutorial we will define what JavaScript Libraries are and why we want to really work with them. So first of all, we want to set up a standard definition that we're going to be working with here and for our purposes, a JavaScript Library is going to refer to a collection of JavaScript code. This collection of JavaScript code will contain commonly-used functions, shortcuts and animation effects that allow us to create really nice, interactive interfaces for our web applications. These JavaScript Libraries are also going to be extending the nature of JavaScript, making it so that you can do things in JavaScript that are not natively part of the JavaScript language. Also, these JavaScript Libraries are going to give us the ability to manipulate data a little bit easier than what we have traditionally had to do. This is going to include manipulation helpers for using JSON, as well as using XML and without having to do a lot of heavy lifting. So the library itself will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting. These JavaScript Libraries are also going to give us what are called widgets which are essentially user interface elements that are commonly encountered in a lot of your Web 2.0 applications. Now, combining all of those things together, we end up getting a collection of JavaScript code that's going to allow us to create in essence these Web 2.0 applications, giving us ability to work with AJAX data, working more swiftly making selections of DOM objects, creating animation effects and generally making our lives a whole lot easier. These JavaScript Libraries are released and maintained by either individuals, groups or companies. Now, because they are released by these different entities, they tend to be licensed to users in some way, be that under some type of open-source license or a commercial license. Most commonly these JavaScript Libraries that we encounter are licensed to users through some type of open-source license. Now the question we need to ask now is what is the difference between libraries, Frameworks and toolkits? Because if you've taken a look at what's out there, you've probably encountered these three different phrases. Well, for our purposes, these terms are going to be used interchangeably and I'm going to be probably referring to a toolkit as a Framework and a library as a toolkit throughout the video tutorial series. However, there is a distinct difference between these so I'm going to go ahead and talk a little bit about that so that we can officially say that there are differences but for our purposes, we're just going to kind of gloss over them. So for the record, a Library is a collection of commonly-used functions. A Framework extends the nature of JavaScript into a more sophisticated programming language and Toolkits are a collection of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet controlled user interface elements that contribute to the user's experience with that application. As distinct as these differences may be, they all share the commonality of being written in JavaScript and being maintained as an external set of code. So in theory they are quite different, but in practice they're collections of handy JavaScript-based extensions that we don't have to program ourselves. So call them what you will. The only thing I really care about is that the scripts work and that implementing them is relatively easy. So with all of that in mind, what we're going to be working with are specifically these collections of JavaScript code that have been released by a group or company of some type, licensed to users for their own use to streamline the development process.