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

> It is a bit sad to say goodbye to such an old friend.

I see this as more of correcting a poor design decision on the part of Rails, rather than having anything to do with the relevance and usefulness of jQuery today.

jQuery was the my first language that got me into coding; I had started javascript but it became very difficult to write a short amount of code for some basic things that I was working with back in 2012.

Ruby on Rails was my first framework for developing web applications. I still use it today, but would remove jQuery as a dependency. I thought it was strange how much of dependency it was for certain things like deleting objects for Rails; I guess it was the right tool for the time.

jQuery is/was a beautiful thing in that it was a concise and fairly nice API for interacting with the DOM. I feel like it was the right tool for the time but now a lot of developers have come to learn the cost of DOM interactions especially with mobile browsers. I am not too certain about ES6 but that stems from my ignorance and not any technical concerns.

I think that while there has been strides in understanding how to make rich clients with javascript without performance issues, I do not think there has been anything as simple as using jQuery. I prefer to use Angular now or vanilla javascript if it is a small scale application and while I like/understand Angular, it took an incredible amount of time and work to properly understand what I was doing. Vanilla js can be incredibly performant, but often times I have had to write 3 times the amount of code to get something going which is a costly in time and maintenance.

jQuery was literally something that took a day for me to understand as non-developer. I hope as javascript progresses that API developers focus on simplicity and ease of use when creating the next big javascript framework.

I think it just depends on what type of web application/site you are making.

For a simple site, it's probably not that big of a deal to hook in jQuery and write some basic scripts.

In my limited experience, if you are writing a Single Page Application, it gets really hard to rationalize changes when everything is hooked in through the DOM. It also gets pretty expensive with mobile browsers as DOM elements carry a huge list of properties and attributes; this why I think libraries like React were made as to have data change and manage state as opposed to the DOM.

At the end of the day, the end user and businesses don't care about what technologies that you use, they just want a site that works and can be delivered on time. I just think that with jQuery, there is a lot of cost in terms of making complex changes in the view that other libraries such as React/Angular/Mithril have been designed to get around. These libraries, however, do have a cost in terms of complexity that I think jQuery never really had.

I agree with you about jQuery getting quickly out of hand if you want to create something like a one page app and you should certainly use something like React or Angular. I do use it. But to do a quick Ajax post, read some data and display a message or show and hide something jQuery is awesome. To tie a quick event listener to a dropdown and do something or to find children of some element jQuery is still few lines of code that don't even need to be cross browser tested. Using vanilla JS for these things when you can do this in few lines of jQuery code seems masochistic.