Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

weblog.rubyonrails.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 143 posts

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#31

Post by dispose13432 »

donw wrote: post #21
aamederen wrote: post #7

Can anyone explain when did jQuery start to fall back in the tech era? What were its failures? It is a bit sad to say goodbye to such an old friend.

Although the comparison isn't perfect, you can think of jQuery as PHP in the late 90s and early 00s. PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. In the same vein, jQuery filled a very important niche when the web was just getting started. It made Javascript accessible, by s…

>PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999.

PHP didn't make it easy. It made it possible.

Until fairly recently, getting a VPS was insanely expensive, so any learner, hobby, startup went to shared hosting.

As a result, any tech which required starting servers or elevated permissions was out, so Java and ISAPI (remember that?) were out.

So the only choice was PHP/ASP or perl/C/tcl cgi scripts.

cgi scripts had to be located in the /cgi-bin directory, so they looked ugly in the URL and simply wasn't designed for the web (so no url_parsing libraries (but no register_globals!)) and no git/github/blogs/stackoverflow whee to just go and download them.

So one had a choice between PHP and ASP.

ASP costed quite a bit more for the license, so PHP took over the internet.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#33

Post by trymas »

jayajay wrote: post #20

jQuery made it super easy to write shitty code. I used to think it was incredible, then I stopped writing it, and now I realize how fucking useless it is.

When it was created - jQuery definitely made javascript not shittier. Javascript was a mess (or browser support for it) and IMHO the most import jQuery goal was to eliminate of cross-browser incompatibilities [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Overview

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#34

Post by grzm »

trymas wrote: post #33
jayajay wrote: post #20

jQuery made it super easy to write shitty code. I used to think it was incredible, then I stopped writing it, and now I realize how fucking useless it is.

When it was created - jQuery definitely made javascript not shittier. Javascript was a mess (or browser support for it) and IMHO the most import jQuery goal was to eliminate of cross-browser incompatibilities [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Overview

Indeed. jQuery and prototype.js made writing browser-independent JavaScript possible. That was huge. And the early competition between the two made introduced (or at least drove the widespread use of) a lot of browser behavior that's commonplace now. Not to mention Ajax.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#35

Post by jayajay »

trymas wrote: post #33
jayajay wrote: post #20

jQuery made it super easy to write shitty code. I used to think it was incredible, then I stopped writing it, and now I realize how fucking useless it is.

When it was created - jQuery definitely made javascript not shittier. Javascript was a mess (or browser support for it) and IMHO the most import jQuery goal was to eliminate of cross-browser incompatibilities [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#Overview

You're right, just like everyone else on this thread.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#37

Post by ofcapl_ »

jdavis703 wrote: post #13
aamederen wrote: post #7

Can anyone explain when did jQuery start to fall back in the tech era? What were its failures? It is a bit sad to say goodbye to such an old friend.

jQuery to me was always meant as a DOM manipulation library. It didn't fall behind per se, it's just that browsers became good enough and standard enough that you no longer needed this type of tool. I think it would have been a huge mistake for jQUery to have attempted to become a Backbone, Angular or React, because it really was never meant for building web apps (of course you could still use jQuery in Backbone and…

yup, I've also always used jQuery for ajax requests - a lot simpler/quicker/less-line-er for development than defining plain xhr requests

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#38

Post by Eric_WVGG »

aamederen wrote: post #7

Can anyone explain when did jQuery start to fall back in the tech era? What were its failures? It is a bit sad to say goodbye to such an old friend.

jQuery never fell back. It’s whole raison d'etre was to be a crutch. The rest of the industry stepped up.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#39

Post by Eric_WVGG »

donw wrote: post #21
aamederen wrote: post #7

Can anyone explain when did jQuery start to fall back in the tech era? What were its failures? It is a bit sad to say goodbye to such an old friend.

Although the comparison isn't perfect, you can think of jQuery as PHP in the late 90s and early 00s. PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. In the same vein, jQuery filled a very important niche when the web was just getting started. It made Javascript accessible, by s…

I apologize in advance and mean no disrespect, but I think this analogy is terrible.

PHP was browser-agnostic. PHP was a flawed tool that existed alongside other tools, and survived based on various merits and despite various drawbacks.

jQuery was a life preserver. Javascript is wholly browser dependent, and at the time of its inception, browser compatibility was a jungle full of king kongs and velociraptors.

Before jQuery, your javascript might work. With jQuery, it would work.

Since then, browser compatibility has gotten better, and the language has advanced. Much of what was previously speculative has become basic.

Pour one out for jQuery, but don’t feel sorry for it’s demise; be grateful for where it brought us.

Re: This Week in Rails: jQuery no longer part of Rails, and more

#40

Post by kalleboo »

dispose13432 wrote: post #31
donw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the comparison isn't perfect, you can think of jQuery as PHP in the late 90s and early 00s. PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. In the same vein, jQuery filled a very important niche when the web was just getting started. It made Javascript accessible, by s…

>PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Perl or Java, especially in the context of The Web In 1999. PHP didn't make it easy. It made it possible. Until fairly recently, getting a VPS was insanely expensive, so any learner, hobby, startup went to shared hosting. As a result, any tech which required starting servers or elevated p…

CGI scripts were also a lot harder to secure on shared hosting. I remember the hosts supporting them required security review before being installation. Then PHP came along with safe_mode and open_basedir, and if there were commonly-deployed solutions for CGI after that, I sure didn't see them because everyone was already using PHP.
Post reply on HN