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React is the new jQuery

bradfrost.com

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Re: React is the new jQuery

#51

Post by pankajdoharey »

joelhooks wrote: post #50
pankajdoharey wrote: post #47

The JS world is so much more hype driven than say ruby, every few months they will have a new framework that promises to solve all the problems in ui land or the backend. They write songs in its praise everyone worships it like this is the one true framework a panacea for all evils. And then when the hype cycle winds down a new framework emerges. I am totally bored of looking at this cycle for the past few yrs. This…

This just isn’t true. React has been going strong for 4 years with no sign of slowing down.

I dont disagree, React has some solid underpinnings but for now VUE has some momentum, till the next one comes along. Google gave up on the idea long back. Google develops Angular but doesnt use it in any of their core products. They themselves use Google Closure library for gmail or word processor.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#52

Post by superfrank »

jaydenseric wrote: post #42
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…

Unless you were doing custom jQuery builds per project (which no-one was), it was always bad. People would routinely drop in the 35kb lib and only use 3-4 functions.

That's not really a problem with jQuery, that's a problem with the way people were using it.

Also, a slow loading JS lib wasn't as much of an issue 5-7 years ago when jQuery was really in its heyday. Web pages were simpler and more information based back then and it was usually a requirement that they be useable without javascript. Since you are (should be) loading jQuery at the end of the page (or asynchronously) the page should render just fine without jQuery and probably would have been loaded by the time any user interaction would have happened.

Also, since users were on computers (mobile wasn't really a thing) and data usage wasn't a limiting factor (most plans were unlimited), loading extra data didn't really matter that much.

Yeah, jQuery had extra functions that you didn't need, but it didn't really hurt much at the time and there wasn't really a better option.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#53

Post by freedomben »

gcommer wrote: post #11

> Burn all of your markup down to the ground and replace what you had with This isn't totally true -- if you really only wanted to implement a single toggle and leave the rest of the page alone, then you could replace just the relevant DOM elements with a container and render into that fragment of the page. (Though really I'd ask why use React if that's the only value you're getting out of it) > I guess that’s why I’…

I feel like the word "proprietary" means something different to me than the author. When I think of proprietary I think of a closed standard that may or may not be copyrighted/patented. Something like React would not even come close to my definition.

Wikipedia seems to agree with me [1], but maybe I'm misinterpreting it:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

Re: React is the new jQuery

#54

Post by phragg »

Brad Frost makes most of his money telling people what they should do instead of actually _doing_ himself.

He's given hundreds of talks all over the world about a component-based approach to style guides in web, but yet cannot fathom the need for React.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#55

Post by jimmaswell »

danShumway wrote: post #32
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 share…

Being used to jQuery, I really see no reason not to use it in new projects. I could learn all the new native equivalents, and even then still ending up doing more work than if I'd been using jQuery, just to save a little bit of page load time and filesize, but it would almost certainly not be worth it.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#56

Post by agumonkey »

jaydenseric wrote: post #42
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…

Unless you were doing custom jQuery builds per project (which no-one was), it was always bad. People would routinely drop in the 35kb lib and only use 3-4 functions.

I wouldn't say jquery was bad. It was really a nice API with interesting innards. Easy to abuse, of course, it was too popular not to end up being the first thing people try to have 'modern' websites.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#57

Post by freedomben »

huy-nguyen wrote: post #45

I think people got carried away with the JSX side of React (which IMO is really just the icing on the cake) and forgot that React was probably the first view library that introduces the notion of the DOM as a pure function of data. It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development. This purity makes UI extremely easy to reason about and makes all DOM changes tractable. I was in a Backbone shop before…

> It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development.

I totally agree, and in fact I would take it a little farther and say it's making functional programming mainstream on the backend as well. Many people I've worked with got their taste via React/Redux and then started adopting things like Elixir/Phoenix for the backend.

Maybe it's an overstatement, but I credit React with driving at least some of that.

Re: React is the new jQuery

#58

Post by jimmaswell »

superfrank wrote: post #52
jaydenseric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you were doing custom jQuery builds per project (which no-one was), it was always bad. People would routinely drop in the 35kb lib and only use 3-4 functions.

That's not really a problem with jQuery, that's a problem with the way people were using it. Also, a slow loading JS lib wasn't as much of an issue 5-7 years ago when jQuery was really in its heyday. Web pages were simpler and more information based back then and it was usually a requirement that they be useable without javascript. Since you are (should be) loading jQuery at the end of the page (or asynchronously) th…

It still doesn't hurt. Less than 300k of a cachable library isn't a big deal for mobile data, and jQuery has never (in any example I know pf at least) been the reason a mobile page is slow. Sites like the default mobile reddit manage to be absolutely atrocious without it (10+ seconds to load anything even on wifi), yet lots of sites with it are completely fine on any smartphone in current use (such as the same phone mobile reddit takes 10 seconds to load on because it's using some awful ajax setup - seriously, they had perfection with .compact and just abandoned it for this crime against humanity).

Re: React is the new jQuery

#59

Post by superfrank »

danShumway wrote: post #32
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 share…

> 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.

That's fair.

> 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.

I totally agree with that, but I don't think you can use that as a knock against jQuery, react, or vue. I think developers, especially js developers with our love of pulling in external packages, have yet to find a great solution for dependency management.

> 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 think lodash can work that way because most of its functions are small and self-contained. It's easy to just bundle in a few select functions when they functions are 100 lines max and don't need the rest of the library, but I don't think React or Vue could use a similar approach.

Who is going to want to use a dropdown component that has the entire React 15.3 lib bundled into it?

Re: React is the new jQuery

#60

Post by freedomben »

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…

> This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader.

I don't disagree but will push back slightly on the appeal to authority. I think in JS land we're getting a little too carried away with celebrity developers (I often joke about "what would Dan Abramov say?" and it's only half-joke). I've been trying hard to focus on the ideas, without regard from who said it.

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