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by carsongross 3579 days ago
Giving up Angular did force me to think more about the DOM. Vanilla jQuery doesn't insert itself as readily into HTML code as an Angular directive can.

And that's why you should use http://intercoolerjs.org for most of your stuff, and a bit of jQuery where necessary for more exotic UX needs. The people who got sick of a mess of jQuery code were right, but they went the wrong direction to fix it. We have to go back.

I know people get tired of my shilling, but intercooler really is a better way for many, and maybe most, web apps to be developed.

7 comments

I am personally fully behind your shilling and try to shill on your behalf whenever possible. It's sad how little interest intercooler has managed to garner when it's a fantastic antidote to so many things that are wrong with client-side development.

I recently used a touch of intercooler on a Django project and it just felt so right. Once I'd included intercooler.js itself, everything else was done via normal http attributes. It felt clean and lightweight.

Keep shilling. I had never hard about it until now. I love the simplicity.

We need more libraries that just do one thing well instead of kitchen sink frameworks like angular.

Thanks Andy!
FYI, none of the code on your site works for me, possibly because I have cookies and localStorage disabled in my browser. Not sure if this is specific to your framework or a quirk of the website itself (hopefully not the whole framework, as I don't understand why this requirement would be imposed if not actually needed by the app that's using it... since the fundamental premise of the framework seems to be "it's lightweight").
Can you give me your browser/OS combo?
Mac OSX El Capitan, Chrome 52
Heh, that's exactly what I'm using. It must be some settings. Do you see anything in the console?
Yes: "intercooler-0.9.7.js:1507 Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document."

(As mentioned above, I have cookies and localStorage disabled via my browser settings.)

Perfect. I'll try to get that fixed for the next release. History support won't work, but there is no reason that the rest of the examples shouldn't.
Personally I welcome useful mentions of relevant alternatives in HN discussions, even if it's someone's own project.

I would encourage you to tone down your rhetoric a bit, though. Intercooler looks like a good lightweight tool for projects with lightweight requirements, but based on your own documentation, the claim that it covers most of what is needed for most modern web apps just hurts your credibility.

Carson is in a bit of a bind in terms of marketing Intercooler. There is a huge mass of community support for frameworks that he feels are taking fundamentally the wrong approach. If he doesn't make a strong case for pushing the pendulum in the other direction then he'll just get drowned out by the echo chamber. Sometimes the plucky underdog has to shout a bit more loudly than is considered polite.

Maybe one could argue that 'survival of the fittest' is working as intended here but perhaps the tipping point is occasionally in need of a nudge.

Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion on the best way to do things, and in the right context it makes for interesting discussions. As I said before, I find the mention of a potentially useful alternative a valuable contribution to such discussion.

However, frequent and obviously excessive claims about the merits someone's personal preferences tend to fall somewhere between noise and trolling, and IMHO they are much less welcome.

I hadn't heard of intercooler.js but that looks pretty awesome. Definitely going to check it out.
Appreciate the shill. Hadn't heard of intercooler, but looks very interesting. At our company we've recently been pondering whether to fully embrace the client heavy approach of frameworks like Angular - which we've found frustrating in many ways (mixing server and client templating, localization, duplicated validation logic etc). We've used PJAX in the past and this looks like a suitably modern replacement.
If you enjoy REST, intercooler dovetails really nicely with it: http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

Happy to help you evaluate it for more advanced stuff (e.g. triggering client-side events from the server) just hit me up on the newsgroup.

I was actually just about to use jQuery + PJAX on a new project, but this looks much better! Perfect timing.
Intercooler.js is quite cool.
Wait a minute. So you've got a down on Angular for turning HTML elements and attributes into JS-driven behaviors, but you're fine with Intercooler, which does literally nothing but that thing? You confuse me, sir.