I'm willing to say that jQuery has changed the face of the JS environment in general.

Wait until GWT has its breakthrough year.

jQuery is designed to work unobtrusively - it's easy to write applications using jQuery that still work with JavaScript disabled.

GWT is a JavaScript black-hole. You simply can't create unobtrusive applications with it - your only option is to write two versions of your site, one using regular HTML and another using GWT.

Also, some of us prefer writing JavaScript to writing Java. Crazy, I know.

Amen! I'm not really a web developer by nature. The client environment has always driven me nuts: layer on layer of slightly-incompatible cruft. And giant javascript libraries just make the problem worse, not better.

jQuery is like a breath of fresh air. I find it absolutely amazing that a library like this (based on minimalism of all things!) actually got mindshare in the modern world. Bravo!

Agreed. I just started using jQuery for a project and I am amazed at how easy it was to learn and implement.

Nah, I don't think it's crazy to prefer JS over Java.

I use Python as a hobby myself.

I can confirm this - I've been using 1.2.6b for a couple weeks on a JQuery-UI based app, and it's much better for anything involving mouse movement. Before, mousemove() was virtually unusable for performance reasons. Now, everything is reasonably snappy.

These improvements sound great. .css, .attr, and .map were major bottlenecks in my performance, meaning a lot of JQuery functionality was just too costly to use (performance-wise). Now, I'll have to play around with JQuery to see if it's usable for some heavy javascripting.

300% speed increase in drag and drop? I'll have to start using that somewhere...