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I loved jQuery, and still do (2019)

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

#141

Post by dageshi »

FinalBriefing wrote: post #120
rchaud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> little bit of a facelift Proceeds to download 30kb (compressed) swiss army knife of a library when just a toothpick would do. jQuery is about as much of a gateway to ES6 as pot is to heroin. Devs who still use jQuery have had 10+ years to learn `document/element.querySelectorAll()`. Longer for event listeners.

When you learnt something with better more easily readable syntax, it's kinda hard to make yourself use something worse to save 30kb, when that saving will be lost with a single image on the page you're loading...

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

#142

Post by ItalyPaleAle »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #9

They loved it still in 2019. How about since then?

I'm the author of the post.

I was not expecting this to surface out of the blue 2 years later, so I had to go back and re-read what I wrote

I still stand behind what I wrote for the most part. If what you are looking for is not building a full SPA and you need compatibility with most browsers, for most users, then jQuery is still a very solid alternative.

A few things have changed however since then:

- As others have pointed out in the comments, a larger chunk of the Web has moved to SPAs, sometimes just because they wanted to build on the back-end something API-driven that can be reused for other scenarios (like mobile apps). The amount of apps that follow the more "traditional" model of server-side generation and then use JavaScript just to "augment" that experience is much smaller, but there's still a lot of use for them if you want to build something quick-and-dirty, like an internal app for your business. - Browsers are now implementing [cache partitioning](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/10/http-cache...) which means that jQuery must now be re-downloaded by every website. It's still a rather small library, and compared with most modern apps the impact is negligible (average web page size is now [1900-2100KB](https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-the-web#bytesTotal)). But this has negated one of the benefits of jQuery, the ability to serve it from a CDN that then is reused by other websites.

For a SPA, I would go 100% with Svelte as my first choice (but you may say I'm biased), but other frameworks are good too especially if you need to leverage existing skills on your team.

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

#143

Post by SavantIdiot »

acabal wrote: post #45

I still use jQuery even for new projects. Yes, these days it's possible to do everything jQuery does using native JS, but I find the native version to be much more verbose and its naming conventions to be far less clear. For example, natively getting a list of children is `el.children` but natively getting the parent is `el.parentNode`, not `el.parent`. Meanwhile, natively getting a list of classes is `el.classList`,…

jQuery is nice for small widgets (if you don't mind loading another library), but as soon as you start to make truly reactive content, it falls on its face. A reactive framework like Vue essentially makes your javascript variables control what is rendered implicitly based on their value, instead of explicitly calling a function.

Since the ViewModel binds the variables to the controls, hundreds of lines of jQuery required to update controls literally vanishes. It blew my mind once I understood what reactivity meant in real life. I rewrote a fairly large site in Vue and the JS LOC shrank by nearly two orders of magnitude (of course, a lot of that was due to the previous webdevs problems).

Now that I'm used to Vue, I view jQuery more like a skin disease, some kind of rash that makes everything ugly and swollen.

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

#144

Post by motogpjimbo »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #112
rchaud wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example, switching from jQuery was just a matter of personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that. My original comment left out some context: on HN, a lot of the hostility to jQuery is either cultural or gatekeeping oriented. Cultural opposition is of the 'not invented here' variety, e.g. 'Why use Dropbox when you could do this w/ rsync? Gatekeeping-related opposition is where it's implied that you sho…

That's not how I see jQuery hate. jQuery promotes bad development patterns, AND brings a cost for end users. Developers will do themselves and futures devs a favor by not choosing to use it. Is it really gatekeeping to expect people to be aware of commonly used 10 year old features? I assume developers who share YMNNJQ are just sick of inheriting messy projects built with jQuery. I know I am.

You've never inherited a terrible, unmaintainable React or Angular app? I have on multiple occasions, and in fact my team is dealing with one right now. I'd prefer a jQuery mess to an Angular/React mess any day of the week. With old-school jQuery apps, at least I can get them to build and can debug the control flow.

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

#145

Post by thera2 »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #112
rchaud wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example, switching from jQuery was just a matter of personal preference. There's nothing wrong with that. My original comment left out some context: on HN, a lot of the hostility to jQuery is either cultural or gatekeeping oriented. Cultural opposition is of the 'not invented here' variety, e.g. 'Why use Dropbox when you could do this w/ rsync? Gatekeeping-related opposition is where it's implied that you sho…

That's not how I see jQuery hate. jQuery promotes bad development patterns, AND brings a cost for end users. Developers will do themselves and futures devs a favor by not choosing to use it. Is it really gatekeeping to expect people to be aware of commonly used 10 year old features? I assume developers who share YMNNJQ are just sick of inheriting messy projects built with jQuery. I know I am.

The article explains why jQuery doesn't promote bad development patterns. That is a consequence of bad development and a misunderstanding of what jQuery is.

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

#148

Post by setr »

spiralx wrote: post #125
acabal wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question should be the other way around: Why is there `getElementsByClassName` when you can do `querySelectorAll('.myClass')`? Why have `getElementById` when we have `querySelectorAll('#myId')`? Why have `getElementsByTagName` when we have `querySelectorAll('tagName')`?

Apart from the historical reasons both `getElementsByClassName` and especially `getElementById` are optimised - the latter being a simple lookup - which I'm not sure `querySelectorAll` is able to take advantage of.

You’d pay the cost of parsing every time, but otherwise I’d expect SelectorAll to directly depend on getElementBy.. as relevant

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

#149

Post by rchaud »

Legion wrote: post #129
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…

> Is this supposed to be making the case ~against~ jQuery? It's supposed to be making a case against jQuery if you're pulling in the whole library just to do this one thing. I've always read the site as "here's how to do it in native JS, yes it's uglier, but if you only need this, you can skip pulling in another dependency."

We use React, Angular and Vue for websites where 99% of the functionality could be done without monstrosities like CSS-in-JS.

Over-engineering websites has been around forever. That's partially why jQuery is modular, letting you pick what you need.This covers the 'use jquery for just this one thing' crowd. And if they're lazy, well, they can hang their heads in shame because they have added an entire 83 KB to the page's initial load time. /s

(unless the browser has a CDN cache stored, in which case it wouldn't impact load time at all)

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