Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails • Hacker News Board

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#21

Post by olavgg » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:29 PM UTC

zeemonkee3 wrote: post #9

spriggan3 wrote: post #5

Rails should stop messing with Javascript all together. Drop JQuery, CoffeeScript, TurboLinks and what not and let the users decide what to use, make it optional. Rails shouldn't require a JS engine in order to run.

This is one of the best things about Django - outside the admin interface it's not opinionated about your frontend setup.

Same thing with Grails, though they've improved support for Angular lately. I prefer vanilla js anyway, its what I used 15 years ago, and it is what I will continue to use the next 15 years and hopefully a lot longer.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#22

Post by pluma » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

tacos wrote: post #2

Someone in DHH's position could approach jQuery and request a subset containing what he needs. And then other projects could benefit from the refactor. If there's even a benefit. This same post by the leader of any other project would involve a study of which components and apps use jQuery. And would state how far back compatibility is to be maintained. So, for example, if commonly used gems require it, or if 90+% of…

The problem isn't jQuery, the problem is that 90% of the use cases for jQuery can now be solved with native APIs (or polyfills if compatibility with older browsers is a requirement).

The main feature is basically element.querySelectorAll (or document.querySelectorAll for the global version). The XHR wrapper can easily be replaced with the fetch API. Class list manipulation is easy with element.classList. The event listener API has also been consistently standardized across all browsers for quite a while.

There are a handful of things you might still want a utility library for (non-CSS animation among other things) but there are smaller, more specialised libraries for those. The utility belt approach of jQuery is no longer necessary.

The same is true for libraries like lodash/underscore, btw. If you target modern JavaScript environments or use polyfills and a transpiler like Babel most use cases of lodash are a solved problem -- not to mention that 90% of all code using lodash in the wild could be written using the native array methods that have been available since ES5 (and IE9).

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#23

Post by stevepike » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

The github thread itself is a nice example of a vibrant open source community. They're thinking about whether the project can be a good entry point for others into OSS, considering adopting outside libraries rather than re-writing it themselves, and generally operating in a pretty positive manner.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#24

Post by IE6 » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #4

monk_e_boy wrote: post #3

As a web dev for the last 15 years or so, this is amazing news. The browsers are finally getting to a point where the pain jQuery solved, is going away.

Is this a legacy thing? I'm a web dev for 10 years now and never used jQuery directly. (I used Ember for half a year, which seems to have jQuery as dependency)

I would say no. It's everywhere. Even as you mention it's a common dependency or comes bundled with a lot of stuff. I have not sat down and written logic that "does the same thing in more than one browser" in a very long time but I'd venture to guess the part of jquery that is browser javascript api abstraction is still very relevant today.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#25

Post by applecore » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

Omakase implies a certain level of excellence in all the individual choices.

I believe Rails is In-N-Out Burger. While it offers few choices, it's reliable and the hamburger is very good. The fries and frontend framework are acceptable but no one goes to In-N-Out for the fries.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#26

Post by bad_user » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

zeemonkee3 wrote: post #9

spriggan3 wrote: post #5

Rails should stop messing with Javascript all together. Drop JQuery, CoffeeScript, TurboLinks and what not and let the users decide what to use, make it optional. Rails shouldn't require a JS engine in order to run.

This is one of the best things about Django - outside the admin interface it's not opinionated about your frontend setup.

Of course "not opinionated" in this case is an euphemism and really means that Django doesn't help you at all and so you have to suffer the incomplete and abandoned middleware of others to have something that resembles an asset pipeline. And that's actually odd, because both Rails and Django are frameworks born for building frontends to MySQL databases, which means these frameworks really are about HTTP 1.1 frontend stuff.

For building backends and web APIs, especially web APIs that do constant streaming of data, maybe through WebSocket, there are actually much better options, so this raises the question, why use Django at all?

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#27

Post by pluma » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

xentronium wrote: post #6

spriggan3 wrote: post #5

Rails should stop messing with Javascript all together. Drop JQuery, CoffeeScript, TurboLinks and what not and let the users decide what to use, make it optional. Rails shouldn't require a JS engine in order to run.

You're missing the central point of default rails stack. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...

Sure, except in this case the Rails defaults are totally at odds with how the larger JS ecosystem has evolved.

CoffeeScript was basically the logical complement to Haml (Ruby-like syntax for HTML) and Sass (Ruby-like syntax for CSS) -- although Sass has since dropped its original syntax and moved on with the CSS-like SCSS.

Since then CS has lost a lot of popularity outside the Rails community. Babel and TypeScript provide similar syntactic niceties based on actual additions to the language (Babel is basically letting you use unfinished future additions to JavaScript before they are actually implement or even published). Sass in many projects has been replaced with libsass used via Node.js bindings. Entire toolchains like Grunt, Gulp, Browserify and Webpack have sprung up around Node.js. Not to mention that universal/isomorphic apps are now a thing and anything nontrivial generally assumes you're using a Node.js backend.

The default Rails stack is precisely that: a Rails stack. Rails is backend software. It has been around long enough to have seen the massive changes the frontend has undergone from being basically "just some assets" to an entire ecosystem of its own right.

The Rails asset pipeline is simply not sufficient for any serious frontend project anymore. This is not Rails' fault. It's just a natural evolution all backend software has observed. Rails is still a good solution for building API servers or even simple frontends. But it's not a complete solution anymore and it can't be.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#28

Post by k__ » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

jcbrand wrote: post #8

k__ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a legacy thing? I'm a web dev for 10 years now and never used jQuery directly. (I used Ember for half a year, which seems to have jQuery as dependency)

So did you do JS development back in 2006 without jQuery?

The first few years I did PHP without much client side scripting.

Then ExtJS, then a short stint with Ember and after that React.

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#29

Post by alexnaspo » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:45 PM UTC

applecore wrote: post #25

Omakase implies a certain level of excellence in all the individual choices. I believe Rails is In-N-Out Burger. While it offers few choices, it's reliable and the hamburger is very good. The fries and frontend framework are acceptable but no one goes to In-N-Out for the fries.

Animal Fries tho

Re: Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

#30

Post by k__ » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 1:45 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #12

jcbrand wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did you do JS development back in 2006 without jQuery?

I started with Prototype. Not sure if it came out before or after the first jQuery, but it was the cool kid for a while. Then the world realized it was a disaster and started moving to jQuery...

I know a bunch of devs who always preferred Mootools and never did jQuery.