I have been trying out jQuery as an alternative to Scriptaculous for my web 2.0 needs both at work and at home. I have but one thing to say: OH MY *&@$ GOD! I have been badly misled into thinking that scriptaculous was the superior platform. It turns out jQuery is smaller, faster, and can do so much more than scriptaculous can do out of the box. Here is an example of what I mean:

$(function (){
$('span.here').onmouseover(
function()
{ $(this).html("I am here");
});

$('span.there').onmouseover(
function()
{ $(this).html("I am there");
});

});
What this says is, when the page loads add an onmouseover listener to every tag on the page that has class 'here' that changes the text of that span to 'I am here' when the mouse moves over it. It does the same thing for all span tags with the class 'there', but with different text. I would have had to code them individually before - this is so cool! (Yes, I'm a geek - funky text turns me on) What I find even more fantastic than the amount of time that jQuery will save me is the number of truely amazing tools that are available out there. Thanks to Tony Holt for finding this one: http://flowplayer.org/tools/index.html. The toolkit at this URL provides an extremely simple interface for creating slideshows, tabs, tooltips, and a ton of other stuff that is missing from the jQuery base library. The best part is, the entire toolkit is only 4KB to download so it loads really freakin' fast. If the jQuery Tools don't have what you want for, then you can certainly find it in jqueryui.com, which is another just as impressive set of tools, but not quite as flashy. I have already started using jQuery in both my work and personal projects, and may the people who built it live long and happy lives!