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I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

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Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#101

Post by rchaud »

ThePadawan wrote: post #72
rchaud wrote: post #61

Every time anything about jQuery is posted, someone will inevitably post the "You might not need jQuery" site. [0] I look at that site and laugh. Is this supposed to be making the case ~against~ jQuery? Maybe the audience for that site are seasoned developers for whom the vanilla JS syntax is easily understood. Everybody else is going to look at those code snippets and think jQ is the way to go. For people that have…

I agree that the vanilla JS snippets seem hilariously more complicated, but simplicity isn't everything. In a corporate environment, if "I need to include jQuery as a dependency" involves asking another team how to set up custom deployment or whatever, and that is the difference of days between deploying a feature or not, then I'll definitely take the hit of 10 more SLoC vanilla JS.

If it's a corporate environment, the standards are different, understandably. But the hostility to jQuery is also primarily concentrated among corporate devs that seemingly cannot imagine that jQuery might be valuable for use cases other than their own.

Not every site out there is an database-driven SPA that needs QA review and a deployment pipeline each time an update is made. Lots of sites are just simple WordPress or even raw HTML pages that need a little bit of a facelift, with animations or transition. jQuery does the trick, and as a bonus, it's a much gateway drug to JS than the official ES6 documentation could ever be.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#102

Post by klysm »

legitster wrote: post #18

I love jQuery. I can just drop in the library onto any existing webpage, and have almost complete control of the DOM with just a few lines of code. And the built in actions and animations are all so simple and perfect for the web. And the structure and naming is so good that I rarely need to look up any references anymore. I get that browser support isn't as important as it used to be, but it is nice to know that you…

I don’t know how universally true this is, but I find that the easier it is to write the first time, the harder it is to maintain. For example, it’s really easy to write a python script but it’s harder to change. It’s harder to use types on a program the first time but it’s easier to change. I think that’s the core of the issue here with peoples negative feelings about jQuery. Sure it’s super easy to make the page do the thing but it’s a long term mess almost always - especially compared to something with more built in structure.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

throwaway_egbs wrote: post #100
bstar77 wrote: post #64

I agree with the author that jQuery was essential for the time. Abstracting away browser compatibility issues in the era of IE6 was a wonderful thing, for sure. The problem is jQuery has no business being used today unless you have to maintain legacy code. Even then I would deprecate jQuery wherever possible. Using jQuery for a "quick and dirty" application today is just terrible and it sends the message to green dev…

> a working Node.js environment Sincere no-snark question from someone who's been out of the frontend game for a while: Why do I need Node in order to do "quick and dirty" frontend development? (FTR I'm with you that jQuery is silly these days. Today's built-in web APIs do pretty much everything jQuery ever did.)

> Why on earth do I need Node in order to do "simple" frontend development

Because using current JS standards while moving the vast majority of the “make it work across a moving-target set of browsers” concerns to build toolchain configuration settings is a simplification from either explicitly managing all the compatibility issues and/or restricting to least-common-denominator JS features. Yes, build toolchains are themselves a source of complexity, but in net they can be a simplification.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#104

Post by nailer »

> Although, at the time we weren’t really using the word “SPA”, and so we’d refer to that category of apps with terms like Rich Internet Application (RIA) or “Web 2.0 app”.

'Rich Internet Applications' were not the same thing as web 2.0 sites. Rather, they were a precursor to modern concepts like Electron and webview2.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#105

Post by bstar77 »

throwaway_egbs wrote: post #100
bstar77 wrote: post #64

I agree with the author that jQuery was essential for the time. Abstracting away browser compatibility issues in the era of IE6 was a wonderful thing, for sure. The problem is jQuery has no business being used today unless you have to maintain legacy code. Even then I would deprecate jQuery wherever possible. Using jQuery for a "quick and dirty" application today is just terrible and it sends the message to green dev…

> a working Node.js environment Sincere no-snark question from someone who's been out of the frontend game for a while: Why do I need Node in order to do "quick and dirty" frontend development? (FTR I'm with you that jQuery is silly these days. Today's built-in web APIs do pretty much everything jQuery ever did.)

Basically what Dragonwriter said. Without getting into the weeds of where webdev was and where it is now, we have made some massive progress. One of the huge improvements was moving to JS compilers (Babel/Typescript/Flow) that normalized features so all browsers going back to IE11 could be reliably supported with the latest language standards.

When you just sling jQuery on a page and try to use spread syntax or async/await, shit's gonna break.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#107

Post by recursive »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #97
rement wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can define your own `$` function. This way you can have the clean code without the entire jQuery library function $(arg) { if (arg.charAt(0) == "#") { // HTML spec does not support ids to start with numbers [0] // (you may not need this conditional on your website) return document.getElementById(arg.slice(1)) } return document.querySelector(arg) } Using this function you can select your comment with $('#27677234'…

True, but jQuery does a lot more than just id selection with $! You could just extend the function to detect '.' vs '#', and do a class selection as well. And then add all of the selectors, subselectors, etc. (similar to, but far more powerful than css3's selectors.) and if you go far enough, you reinvented zepto (but still a long way from jQuery) (actually, since $ is basically synonymous with jQuery, it'd probably…

> True, but jQuery does a lot more than just id selection with $!

Yes. For a high degree of jquery-compatibility, you can use my library.

    const $ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#108

Post by throwaway_egbs »

bstar77 wrote: post #105
throwaway_egbs wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a working Node.js environment Sincere no-snark question from someone who's been out of the frontend game for a while: Why do I need Node in order to do "quick and dirty" frontend development? (FTR I'm with you that jQuery is silly these days. Today's built-in web APIs do pretty much everything jQuery ever did.)

Basically what Dragonwriter said. Without getting into the weeds of where webdev was and where it is now, we have made some massive progress. One of the huge improvements was moving to JS compilers (Babel/Typescript/Flow) that normalized features so all browsers going back to IE11 could be reliably supported with the latest language standards. When you just sling jQuery on a page and try to use spread syntax or async…

Right, I get that. What I don't get is why Node is a requirement for a JS compiler. Is that just to get the runtime? I'd always thought of Node as a server on top of a V8 runtime.

(Thank you for your patience with this backend dev who finds your whole world very confusing.)

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#109

Post by todd_t »

bstar77 wrote: post #64

I agree with the author that jQuery was essential for the time. Abstracting away browser compatibility issues in the era of IE6 was a wonderful thing, for sure. The problem is jQuery has no business being used today unless you have to maintain legacy code. Even then I would deprecate jQuery wherever possible. Using jQuery for a "quick and dirty" application today is just terrible and it sends the message to green dev…

Quick and dirty should be a combination of Alpine and/or htmx.

Re: I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

#110

Post by bstar77 »

throwaway_egbs wrote: post #108
bstar77 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically what Dragonwriter said. Without getting into the weeds of where webdev was and where it is now, we have made some massive progress. One of the huge improvements was moving to JS compilers (Babel/Typescript/Flow) that normalized features so all browsers going back to IE11 could be reliably supported with the latest language standards. When you just sling jQuery on a page and try to use spread syntax or async…

Right, I get that. What I don't get is why Node is a requirement for a JS compiler. Is that just to get the runtime? I'd always thought of Node as a server on top of a V8 runtime. (Thank you for your patience with this backend dev who finds your whole world very confusing.)

Node is required because that's what is used to compile the JS on the command line, it's a nodejs process. Once that's complete, any web server can serve the newly produced JS/CSS/HTML files.

JS is interpreted by the browser, but we compile locally so that the code produced implements workarounds for missing language features. The code produced is typically minified so that the payload sent to the browser is much smaller than it would otherwise be.

Node is analogous to Python, Ruby and PHP... they all can run webservices, power desktop apps and compile/build projects.

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