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In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?
I guess I'm behind the times in that I still use jQuery. Is it really worthwhile to go through everything described in this article to create a simple filterable table?
If your fancy little table is part of a large app, or even a simple app, it is much easier to implement the entire app using a framework like Angular. The model view concepts really help to tie things together.
With Node, I can get quite far with just a couple of dependencies that install quickly. I don't need transpilation unless I want to use TypeScript or PureScript and I can target any version I want. I find it very fun to mess around with Node and a bunch of little modules.
I am slowly "transferring" back to server-rended pages using Node or Elixir. Probably not good for my employment (even in NYC most JS jobs are frontend), but whatever.
If I was learning JS right now and didn't care about employment I'd just learn Node (which just means learning JS really) and experiment with stuff.
This is pretty much why I don't do front-end. I'm fully capable of it, but I just don't like keeping up with this flavor-of-the-week. It just doesn't feel like programming to me, or at least not the programming I enjoy. Strangely, I see so many new developers rushing toward the front-end, which seems much more complicated in many ways than just building solid web API services, analyzing data, etc.
The front-end is harder IMHO, but as another poster mentioned, the opportunities are tremendous.
This is pretty much why I don't do front-end. I'm fully capable of it, but I just don't like keeping up with this flavor-of-the-week. It just doesn't feel like programming to me, or at least not the programming I enjoy. Strangely, I see so many new developers rushing toward the front-end, which seems much more complicated in many ways than just building solid web API services, analyzing data, etc.
There is a money issue. If you do keep up, you'll get amazing job offers. If you manage to really be on the edge, you can give talks as well, expose yourself as a consultant. That's much easier in JS than with Ruby, Python or whatever else.
This was actually a didactic piece. While criticizing the current state of affairs, it gives a nice overview of many of the emerging technologies and how they fit together, even if for some tasks it feels retarded to pull such an entangled mess of dependencies. You can then go insane diving into any particular one :)
Facebook, Google, large startups, and the others which are building these tools are doing so to solve the problems they experience in their teams' front-end dev processes. Ironing out the kinks in the code assembly line. And they are of course doing so in a path-dependent fashion: add tool N+1 to solve problem N+1 given the existing toolchain. The result is a lot of tools and a lot of context to imbibe at once, but it doesn't mean they are solving nonexistent problems. Just problems you don't have, or don't know you have, or don't have yet, or can afford to leave unmanaged when developing a small site with just a couple people.
I guess I'm behind the times in that I still use jQuery. Is it really worthwhile to go through everything described in this article to create a simple filterable table?
if ALL you are displaying is a table, then you can write a quick little jQuery(or native JS) function to remap the array and re-draw the DOM. If your fancy little table is part of a large app, or even a simple app, it is much easier to implement the entire app using a framework like Angular. The model view concepts really help to tie things together.
Even for trivial SPAs it's often easier to roll the basic functionality yourself. Flipping over to something like Angular introduces technical and cognitive overhead that often isn't worth the trouble for something simple.
I guess I'm behind the times in that I still use jQuery. Is it really worthwhile to go through everything described in this article to create a simple filterable table?
Just start with this example and customize to what you want to do:
Hilarious article, but seriously, can somebody tell me where I should begin learning all of this stuff? What are the 2 or 3 top-priority things I should get started with, if I have experience with Django/HTML/JQuery, and want to expand into more advanced frontend programming?
One day perhaps React and Redux will be replaced by something else, but I think the strategy of a GUI functional layer consuming a stream of events is here to stay, and I wouldn't be surprised if it spread to native app design.
I couldn't get through the entire thing. Even knowing that it's a fun/sarcastic piece of writing, the portrayed pain is all too real, as someone just starting to dive into the front-end. In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?
But honestly, I'd go with React if you can. The reason is, if the app starts taking off, and you end up with a team maintaining your app, you're much less likely to end up with an unmaintainable mess in two years than if you use just jQuery.
All applications, especially websites want frameworks. The framework is essentially a way to organize the massive amount of complexity boiled in. If you just roll with libraries, then you end up cobbling together a framework on top of it. You will then have to maintain this framework. This is fine when it's just you, it will coalesce into a bunch of conventions that's fairly easy for you to reason about.
But once you start involving others, then you're going to see your nice conventions get rekd like a bull in a china shop. Not everybody sees problems the same way you do.
If you pick the framework beforehand, then you don't need to maintain it, you can let the nice people at Facebook / Google do it for you. And whenever you finally get others involved, they're limited in the amount of architectural damage they can do because they have to stick to the conventions of the framework.