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by dabernathy89 3499 days ago
Absolutely. Most projects that would be considered "websites" rather than "web applications" are likely candidates for jQuery. It's still extraordinarily useful.
2 comments

This.

Pick the right technology to solve the problem you're trying to solve.

Some inexperienced devs just try and cram every single technology they've ever heard of into a simple project when it's not needed. You're not at Facebook's scale just yet where many of these abstractions are anything other than an extra complication and a waste of time and future liability.

Your average simple website for a law firm, bike repair shop, or a pizza delivery place doesn't need 93 different libraries/frameworks/technologies/build systems/etc to show/hide a couple products or submit a form or two. You can go pretty far with just jQuery in many cases.

It gets a little more complicated as you go from simple site to more complex site to app to more complex app, but I see too many developers trying to be trendy and over engineering simple problems and wasting a lot of time and money.

I was going to say the same thing. If you are building an app something like Angular is great. But for a website that needs to be simple, fast and easy to maintain then jQuery still works well.
I disagree. jQuery was the tool that acts as a "polyfill" for cross-browser compatibility. Nowadays jQuery is dying, not because of React, Angular or TypeScript, Elm. It's dying because of browser-support of `querySelectorAll`, unified event handlers, unified AJAX request API and others.

jQuery had it's time. Now you just use "vanilla" JS and it is enough. No external dependencies for your landing-page / non-web-app site.

Here's what I tell my devs:

Yes, "you might not need jQuery". But, the first time you have to log real hours fixing a cross-browser bug that the jQuery team already took care of, I'm fucking firing you. Choose wisely.

Probably hyperbolic, but if not what you're really telling your devs is:

"If you make a mistake try to cover it up rather than be honest about it, because your arse is on the line".

I'm looking at you, XMLHttpRequest (thank you, $.ajax).
And upon hearing that I'd fucking resign.