Think of it this way - Everyone loves Ruby on Rails. But Rails IS slow. But that doesn't mean I should re-write my code in just plain C, just because it is fast and Rails is no longer needed according to a bunch of bloggers.
I think this argument is not about Jquery and is about frameworks in general.
In my humble opinion, I think [1]
$.ajax({
url: "test.html",
context: document.body
}).done(function() {
$(this).addClass("done");
});
is better than: function ajaxFunction() {
var ajaxRequest; // The variable that makes Ajax possible!
try {
// Opera 8.0+, Firefox, Safari
ajaxRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (e) {
// Internet Explorer Browsers
try {
ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
try {
ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
// Something went wrong
alert("Your browser broke!");
return false;
}
}
}
// Create a function that will receive data sent from the server
ajaxRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (ajaxRequest.readyState == 4) {
var ajaxDisplay = document.getElementById('ajaxDiv');
ajaxDisplay.innerHTML = ajaxRequest.responseText;
}
}
var age = document.getElementById('age').value;
var wpm = document.getElementById('wpm').value;
var sex = document.getElementById('sex').value;
var queryString = "?age=" + age + "&wpm=" + wpm + "&sex=" + sex;
ajaxRequest.open("GET", "ajax-example.php" + queryString, true);
ajaxRequest.send(null);
}
[1]http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ajax-javascript.php