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

React is the new jQuery

bradfrost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 206 posts

Re: React is the new jQuery

#31

Post by kbenson »

statictype wrote: post #9

If you tear out something like jQuery, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get those accordions to expand and collapse again. If you tear out React, you get a blank page. React is a big commitment. This is probably the only real concern I see. jQuery is a library for DOM manipulation. It can co-exist with many other libraries. React is an entire framework. These days you need jquery less because browsers are…

> These days you need jquery less because browsers are more standards compliant and css animations basically work.

Originally, jQuery's big selling point wasn't that it handled animations, it was that it gave you a query selector, and one that could be used in any browser. jQuery predates the release of chrome, and came out a few years before document.querySelector was added to Firefox and Chrome was released.

jQuery was monumentally more useful for common actions compared to its contemporaries, such as Dojo, MooTools and Prototype.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#32

Post by danShumway »

superfrank wrote: post #13

> React is the new jQuery Anyone who uses "the new jQuery" as some sort of insult (as it seems Sara did in her tweet) probably hasn't been a developer for more than a few years or is just trying to sound smarter than they are by bashing an easy target. The reason jQuery got so popular is that it made common tasks so much easier than anything else at the time. Anyone who was doing web development before jQuery knows w…

I don't think JQuery ever got bad. It just got unnecessary, like you said. But it took a lot of work to convince people that it was unnecessary.

A charitable explanation of Sara's tweet might be that, like with jQuery, it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project.

The other comparative downside of JQuery was that components started to rely on it as a shared library, which meant developers suddenly needed to do dependency management. That is (usually) a bad idea. React absolutely does have that problem as well - probably to an even worse degree than jQuery widgets ever did.

This is kind of the same concern I have with Vue to be honest. I use Vue for prototyping and will probably use it in some final apps as well. But I'm probably not ever going to use a component that someone else has written if it relies on Vue.

IMO Lodash went the right direction with this. A component or library can depend on Lodash, pull in just the functions that they use for a final build, and then nobody else in the entire dev toolchain needs to know or care. No risk of conflicting dependencies, build size stays low, etc...

I kind of wonder if the problems Vue solves for me could be solved better by a smaller, lodash-style library instead of a framework.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#33

Post by BlackjackCF »

superfrank wrote: post #13

> React is the new jQuery Anyone who uses "the new jQuery" as some sort of insult (as it seems Sara did in her tweet) probably hasn't been a developer for more than a few years or is just trying to sound smarter than they are by bashing an easy target. The reason jQuery got so popular is that it made common tasks so much easier than anything else at the time. Anyone who was doing web development before jQuery knows w…

Agreed. I LOVED jQuery and I could do some serious damage with it before Angular/React came along.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#34

Post by joesb »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #16

React has a lot of inertia behind it, although it doesn’t really make things easier. The amount of js code to make even basic things work is high, and with so many different styles of writing react/js code, large codebases require significant effort to keep maintainable. Which is to say, with this much effort put into structuring maintainable react js code, one could pretty much develop in any js ui framework (includ…

Virtual DOM and ability to derived your DOM state from props and state is not something you can easily done with jQuery or any UI library that doesn't have that concept.

It's not something you can easily implement yourself either.

That's the main part that makes React code maintainable.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#35

Post by joesb »

benatkin wrote: post #23

This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader. There are different types of thoughts, though. This is simply an observation: > Don’t @ me I’m not trying to start a controversy. I’m only stating an observation. https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1001189524477743105 React, like jQuery, could have done more to keep people from writing bad code. With React, they made the same mistake that Angular did, wh…

They should done more to keep people from writing bad code, they should have less rule.

What does that even mean?

Re: React is the new jQuery

#36

Post by jaequery »

vue seem to be an evolution of react and angular.

it is as if some react developer sat down and said, “how can we make this even simpler so that even my grandson can do it.”

i appreciate when we have guys like the authors of Vue come forward driving the community and taking web development to the next level giving us a more elegant solution.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#37

Post by quxbar »

joesb wrote: post #34
sheeshkebab wrote: post #16

React has a lot of inertia behind it, although it doesn’t really make things easier. The amount of js code to make even basic things work is high, and with so many different styles of writing react/js code, large codebases require significant effort to keep maintainable. Which is to say, with this much effort put into structuring maintainable react js code, one could pretty much develop in any js ui framework (includ…

Virtual DOM and ability to derived your DOM state from props and state is not something you can easily done with jQuery or any UI library that doesn't have that concept. It's not something you can easily implement yourself either. That's the main part that makes React code maintainable.

I agree, this is the part that people seem to be ignoring. Yes, you can make a proof of computational equivalence between jQuery and React, but you cannot deny the massive increase in human usability that an set of components brings. There's far more interesting set of things you can do, Redux + the litany of other related libraries, a vibrant ecosystem unto themselves, prove this. I started my career out slinging jQuery and after 4 years of React I never want to go back.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#39

Post by thatswrong0 »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #16

React has a lot of inertia behind it, although it doesn’t really make things easier. The amount of js code to make even basic things work is high, and with so many different styles of writing react/js code, large codebases require significant effort to keep maintainable. Which is to say, with this much effort put into structuring maintainable react js code, one could pretty much develop in any js ui framework (includ…

Maybe development requires more overhead, but you have to factor in reading understanding and maintenance. React, with a proper state management library like React, in my humble limited opinion, is easy to understand because of its functional nature. The view rendering is a function of the props it receives, whether it come from a context based store like Redux or just passed thru. I don’t find reading other peoples React code terribly difficult because most of it is not surprising. Even components which make heavy use or internal state are never so terribly difficult to understand.

I don’t think the same could be said of your random JQuery or. Backbon based project

Re: React is the new jQuery

#40

Post by wolfspider »

I think there is some confusion comparing jquery with frameworks in general heh- time for a history lesson! So back in the mid-aughts right before jquery there was prototype. I got hired into a job where I had to maintain sites written with both in the past and they were very similar to each other. Ajax was new and so was the class based handling of JS to make it more object oriented. It could be done but prototype made it convenient. It was possible to manipulate objects before applying them to the DOM however it was really verbose...academic I would call it. Then prototype’s cool younger brother arrives (jquery) and it became so easy to pull this stuff off it was like a giant party. Learn jquery? Your hired! Ahh the halcyon days ;) Anyhow- if you’ve lived through things like CGI and DHTML (and java servlets to a lesser extent) they were like the malaise era of web dev but jquery flipped the tables there has been NOTHING like it to date. We’ve gone back to academic with colorful packaging (I’m lookin at you angular!) and react coupled with redux just isn’t the same- it’s interesting but not a quick study. So..back then we could pick up a program in 24 hrs book and land a job. Today we can read 24 books and scratch the surface. Jquery was a movement not a framework and the statement being made was life is too short to NOT be incredible, we can all be incredible with jquery so why not? More comparable to the Misfits showing up to a Johnny Cash show than just another framework...just my two cents.
Post reply on HN