[tcfunk]

Seems like most of the comments on here pertain to the relevance of jQuery, rather than jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

Sure most sites still use jQuery, but do very many use jQuery UI anymore? jQuery Mobile? I've never seen a project use jQuery Mobile.

[hrktb]

I saw jQuery mobile projects for sites with insanely large expected user base.

For instance a gas comapny’s customer information site, and the goal was to have html that could be displayed on post wap phones or super old blackberries.

It’s really less to do super fancy stuff, and more to have forms that don’t break on super exotic browsers we didn’t even know existed.

[merb]

> on super exotic browsers we didn’t even know existed.

they do not work well with jQuery or even jQuery mobile. consider ANTGalio a browser that was used in a lot of embedded stuff could not work with anything above emcascript 3 and even than had some pretty wierd behavior. jquery did not work on it.

[maxxxxx]

I used jQuery UI a long time ago and was not very impressed. Definitely not on the level of jQuery itself.

[invalidusernam3]

I tried to use jQuery Mobile for a project once many years ago. It was a disaster, I ended up rewriting the entire thing

[chrisparton1991]

I used it for a project when I was at university. It was appalling to use. Lots of the examples on the jQuery mobile website failed (e.g. weird redirections when closing modals, lots of odd flashing and jumping around).

A few years later I went back to check the examples and they had the same problem.

[jgillich]

I built a complete mobile app using jQuery mobile and it was a total disaster as well. I had so many ugly hacks in place just to achieve what any decent SPA framework does out of the box nowadays. To this day I have no idea what the actual purpose of jQuery mobile was, it sucked for single page apps and felt more like a quick way to make HTML pages responsive. Which can of course be achieved with a bit of CSS or one of the many responsive CSS frameworks.

Thankfully the app never made it to production, for various non-technical reasons.

[srcmap]

If you have to select a mobile framework today, what would you choose?

I play with Framework 7 https://framework7.io/ and it looks very nice.

Any other suggestions?

[invalidusernam3]

F7 is my favourite as well. Two of the featured apps on the home page are mine :D

[devoply]

ionic. in fact if you took jQuery mobile and made it reactive via something like Angular, React, or Vue.js it might make it usable for today's expectations.

[wolco]

quasar - ionic like vue framework.

[starik36]

I had the exact opposite experience. I found jQuery Mobile to be very cohesive and simple to use. And the documentation was pretty much on the spot.

[martin_bech]

I had the exact same experience. Performance on Android was horrible!

[taco_emoji]

I'd bet the decline in both of these is 99% due to Bootstrap.

[Groxx]

I've seen mobile on a moderate number of mobile-web-app side projects... though I haven't looked into these lately with anywhere near the frequency that I did a couple years ago. Generally it seemed pretty quick and easy to do good-quality simple stuff (like UI), though nobody did much beyond that because it was tricky to fine tune (like UI). Not sure what (if any) the current hotness is, aside from React + random components found online.

[Edmond]

I used JQuery Mobile to build http://letzcode.com/

Maybe it's time make it a real mobile app :)

[dexwiz]

I didn’t sign up, but I did click around the JS and scheme docs on my iPhone. The horizontal overflow is hidden so half the content is not shown. I cannot zoom out to fix the issue.

[chmike]

I'm using jQuery mobile for a small shopping list application. What I miss are manually sortable lists.

[DonHopkins]

I wrote a prototype of a questionnaire system using jQuery Mobile version 1.0, to see what it was like [1].

The problem I wanted to solve mapped pretty closely to exactly what jQuery Mobile was designed to do: page through a bunch of screens with controls on them. But the results were pretty "blah", and I needed a lot more control over the presentation and behavior than it provided.

Instead, I just used raw jQuery, which worked fine.

But I did use end up using one jQuery UI file "jquery.ui.widget.js" for its "$.widget" Widget Factory [2] and Widget Plugin Bridge [3], which provided some useful plumbing. But I didn't use any of jQuery UI's actual widgets. I also used $.widget for jQuery pie menus [4].

If there's a better alternative or idiom than $.widget, I'd love to know! But it worked fine for me, and I didn't need to drag in the rest of jQuery UI.

The weird thing about jQuery is: a "jQuery object", the result of querying a selector, is not an actual widget or DOM object -- it's the result of a query, which might contain any number of "objects", or none. It's ephemeral, not for storing persistent state like a widget.

So you need another way to represent and bridge messages from "jQuery objects" created by querying selectors, to actual stateful "widget" objects associated with concrete DOM objects, and that's what $.widget provides.

It creates a new "widget" object the first time you call it, and after that it updates and sends commands to the existing widget (or widgets).

Because of the way jQuery selectors work, you can actually create and configure a whole bunch of widgets at the same time with one $.widget command! Which is useful: "make each object with this class an instance of that widget with these parameters". And you can use $.widget with jQuery selectors to update parameters and broadcast messages to multiple widgets at once.

Suffice it to say, it's not how you'd design a user interface widget toolkit if you were you starting from Scratch [5]. But it is, if you were starting from jQuery.

[1] http://donhopkins.com/home/prototype/prototype.html

[2] http://api.jqueryui.com/jQuery.widget/

[3] http://api.jqueryui.com/jQuery.widget.bridge/

[4] https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie/blob/master/javascri...

[5] https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Smalltalk

[fatwa]

I have used jQuery UI for its "sortable" interaction. It did the job. I would use it again. Is there any alternative anyway?

[chrisparton1991]

Absolutely, lots of people are keen for jQuery UI features without the bloat of jQuery+jQuery UI.

For sortable, there's https://github.com/RubaXa/Sortable. It comes in at around ~6KB gzipped, compared to ~80kb for jQuery UI's JavaScript (not to mention CSS and jQuery itself).