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by wolco 3133 days ago
Just use jquery. In a few years jquery will be rediscovered and praised all over again.
5 comments

There's a lot of jquery code out there that's basically lines and lines of for loops to maintain a state machine. Stuff that all these nice frameworks handle for you in a clean, bug-free way.

Almost every day of the year,

   <div id='business-class' ng-class="{selected:seatType=='business'}">
     Business Class
   </div>
feels better to me than:

    $('#seat_type').on('change', function(){
     if(this.value == 'business'){ 
         $('#business-class').addClass('selected');
     } else {
         $('#business-class').removeClass('selected');
     }
    });
There are other considerations, angular/React aren't the only solutions to this... but having something to handle this sort of stuff cleanly and generally is a no-brainer to me.

jQuery's an amazing tool at the low level, but there are some higher-layer stuff we can easily apply to manage state.

Your Angular example appears to be an incomplete example, the jQuery one is more complete, so is this a valid comparison? When using jQuery you can still embed logic inside templates using something like https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder which is really tiny.

   $('#business-class').toglleClass('selected', this.value === 'business');
And $('#business-class') should be in a var.
this is indeed a cleaner example.

I think if you are diligent about your layout, you can separate out your DOM operations from your logic operations (think Flux) and end up with nice and simple code like this.

Personally I like the "rails" given to me in Angular/React (especially given I know how to circumvent them). I also am more productive in them. But I bet a lot of skilled programmers can go far with just simple tools like jQuery.

At least for me, having a paradigm enforced is useful, especially on larger projects with multiple stakeholders.

Don't. Please. I don't want to maintain your state spaghetti.

Or if you don't have state to manage, but a few small interactions, just use the plain browser API.

Back in the day jQuery was useful to maintain developer sanity across all the different browser API implementations and their quirks but, nowadays, it's mostly an unnecessary dependency. Even AJAX, which jQuery simplified immensely, has been superseded by fetch.

90% of jQuery code out there is querySelectorAll and fetch.

Not all frontend code needs state management in fact most could benefit feom having he state managed externally = websockets.

Plain javascript is ideal. If for semi-unsimple form validation you need to reach for a full featured framework and create a reusable component that will only be used once, stop. jQuery can simplify the experience.

I didn't make it clear: I meant UI state, not application state. DOM manipulation is inherently stateful, and there is no way websockets are going to help with it.

Now your state can live in up to three places: DOM, JS and backend. It's even easier to desync UI state unless you rebuild the page from scratch (sending complete HTML as in old-school AJAX... or using React and the likes to make it fast enough to apply a diff of DOM changes).

I agree you don't need a framework for simple frontend code like form validation but:

> jQuery can simplify the experience.

How so? I'll quote my other reply:

> jQuery brings nothing to the table in 2017. I'm willing to be proved wrong. Is there anything that jQuery vastly simplifies?

(Compared to vanilla JS + CSS)

> Don't. Please. I don't want to maintain your state spaghetti.

I fail to understand how not using jQuery prevents anyone from writing spaghetti code.

I've seen plenty of spaghetti code written with "framework du jour", Angular and React included.

> state spaghetti

State is particularly hard to manage using jQuery because, unlike frameworks, it has no builtin way to deal with it.

The disconnect between DOM and JS state is what makes frontend programming a pain to deal with. This led to ad-hoc bug-ridden "state machines" (i.e. spaghetti global variables all over the place) that broke at the very first unexpected interaction.

If you're using a proper state machine (or your program is simple enough to not need them) you're better off just using the regular browser API.

jQuery brings nothing to the table in 2017. I'm willing to be proved wrong. Is there anything that jQuery vastly simplifies?

Even though your opinion seems unpopular here but I agree with you. If you're a one or two person team then jQuery, Angular 1 and PHP is all that you need to launch a SaaS site super quickly.
I'm not sure how you're agreeing with them since you threw in a framework, Angular 1.
Sorry, I guess you're right that I don't fully agree after all, because creating a site without Angular 1 (or Vue) would be certainly a nightmare for me too.
Agreed.

For some reason people in these threads think there's a battle between jQuery/vanillaJS vs a framework when the real distinction is the complexity of the application you're building.

Yes, when your needs are simple enough, you don't need anything. For some reason people get upvoted on HN/Reddit when they point this out.

As (currently) a full time web developer I am very confident this will not happen. Feel free to call me out in the future if I am proven wrong.
$, _, backbone what more do you need? :D
A gun to kill myself.
What? was the grunt, gulp and pack not enough yet?

ps. I use closure-compiler and some py scripts... I hope ur running!

Whiskey
Marionette.js?
Thanks for the headsup.

I will look into backbone.radio but mn being 50k loc makes it hard for me to consume.

Yeah, if you _are_ still using Backbone, then Marionette is a must-have. I can also recommend Ampersand.State as a vastly improved version of Backbone.Model, and Epoxy.js for data binding.

That said, an even better answer is to start using React for your views instead. I wrote a post about how we started adding React and Redux into our existing Backbone codebase, incrementally: http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/07/react-redux-backbon... .

unfortunately I can not see any benefit for me to spend time with react or redux. When the libraries I'm interested in uses $(slickgrid).

Maybe when I have resources free to spend time learning new stuff.

But for now my mvp backbone $/ui/slickgrid connexion flask app is doing its job. And personally I like Javascript 1.5 more. Run that through closure-compiler and I have a lean js app.

gulping the cool aid was the last straw that broke the camel(damn missed perl) back. I'm happy if I can drive everything from py.