Ask HN: Is jQuery on its way out?

Yes, you can use the native API for some of what jQuery does. but, don't let anyone here fool you - the full API of jQuery has not been completely replaced by the "vanilla" API. And, jQuery's API is still much better designed.

Now, if you're building something Very Large, you don't want to lean on jQuery alone. If you're using a framework whose footprint includes what jQuery does (anything with a virtual DOM and automatic updates, for example), then there's no point in also using jQuery.

There's room for all of the tools. Use the right one for the right job. Do enough front end development, and you'll know which one to pull out when you need it.

End users don't know or care if an app uses it or React/Angular/Vue.

I've built SPAs with it and don't see why that's a problem for others who've mentioned it, but that's because I don't know what specific problems they ran into. I've not run into any.

But, I also use CouchDB as a backend, almost all my app code is JS running in the browser, and I don't use Node.js at all. I still do my server side work in Perl. So I'm not building apps like most are right now.

React/Angular/Vue, etc, might work better for some apps, and/or apps with a zillion users hitting the server a zillion times, but my apps don't have either of those issues to deal with. They barely touch my web server or the CouchDB. All the heavy lifting is done in the user's web browser.

The only real downside to that design approach, if we choose to call it that, is that we don't track every click a user makes, but as a user I really like knowing that.

The best thing about going with jQuery is I didn't really have to learn how to use it. I do that on a need to know basis and generally go to Stackoverflow where I almost always find the best way along with a few other ways to do something.

I'll offer that using a "much smaller, lighter weight library" offers a kind of a false sense of gain. You can use Service Workers to cache jQuery on the client side, or a CDN to deliver it, so it's not really costing you much (or any) bandwidth to deliver it to users, and modern web browsers are not choking on the size of it. I test my apps on a old Raspberry Pi running their latest OS and Chrome and they're plenty fast (very fast).

Here's the thing. I spent about two months looking for the "Best" way to build apps. Most of that time was going over frameworks at TodoMVC.com. When I was finished I didn't have any better idea of what was best than when I'd started, but I did have a clue about what I'd have invest to get up to speed with them, and in most cases it was lot.

So, I decided to instead explore what was the easiest way, and not just for me really, though I don't expect anyone should agree, but just generally speaking I tried to consider that.

I use the Apache web server and CouchDB, PouchDB.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap. It's a pretty amazing feature set those tools provide, and how easy they are to use together.

Almost no one I know does it this way.

Not everyone is building web applications, sometimes we just want a simple tool to do a single job.