[superfrank]

> 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 what a godsend it was at the time. JQuery was a fantastic leap forward for development at the time it was released.

JQuery didn't become bad, the rest of the development world caught up and made it unnecessary.

[danShumway]

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 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.

This is kind of the same concern I have with Vue to be honest. I use Vue for prototyping and will probably use it in some final apps as well. But I'm probably not ever going to use a component that someone else has written if it relies on Vue.

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 kind of wonder if the problems Vue solves for me could be solved better by a smaller, lodash-style library instead of a framework.

[superfrank]

> 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?

[williamxd3]

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

And who would want a dropdown component that has its own little rendering framework inside when you are using React for that?

[tracker1]

Maybe not for a dropdown component, but I built a calendar component that stood alone using preact and redux, and the final size was still smaller than most calendar components of similar complexity.

[williamxd3]

Yeah, Preact is great for standalone widgets

[danShumway]

To clarify what I was talking about with dependencies, many jQuery widgets used jQuery as a global dependency. This is very different from just building a bloated library - I might prefer a small library that has fewer dependencies for performance reasons, but I can still use a large one without any engineering downsides.

The problem is if I need to manage the dependencies between multiple components - if there's a singleton dependency that multiple components are accessing. It's dangerous not because it's a dependency, but because the components consuming it may have different requirements or assumptions that conflict with each other, and I won't be able to fix those assumptions without forking the components.

This is where you would run into scenarios where somebody's widget was only jQuery 2.x compatible, and somebody else's wanted to add custom events that interfered with scroll direction or something... I still have horror stories about trying to debug that kind of crap.

Shared dependencies really seem like they should be a good idea, but unless you're willing to fork other people's code or your app is only going to have a very short lifespan they're usually more trouble then they're worth.

To be fair, I think jQuery eventually did go the same way as Lodash. I haven't checked in a while but I'm pretty sure that they now have a way to generate a custom build of jQuery to be locally scoped to whatever thing you're building.

It would be tough for Vue to go the same route (still much easier than React) but that just means that you should probably only use Vue for your own projects and should avoid importing 3rd-party components that rely on having it globally accessible.

[eropple]

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

...Nobody? Which is why peer dependencies exist.

NPM/Yarn aren't perfect by any stretch, but maybe mind Chesterton's Fence and refrain from reflexively assuming the developers of them are idiots?

[danShumway]

Peer dependencies are a very valuable tool, and I'm glad that they exist, but most developers should avoid them in most scenarios. If a package requires a peer dependency, it's probably not worth using. There are exceptions but... in general.

This has been reinforced over and over again throughout JS history. jQuery, Grunt, Gulp, Angular, Bootstrap, and eventually React will join that list as well. You almost always end up with the nightmare of having to do package management because widget A and widget B interfere with each other. This is the same exact reason why it's good practice to avoid defining JS variables in the global scope.

Peer dependencies are just global variables at the package level.

To be clear, the people who built NPM were not idiots. Node handles packaging really intelligently - via a node_modules folder. There was a lot of thought put into how to make this system flexible: for example, you can have a node_modules not just at your root, but even in subfolders. This allows you to have custom implementations of a dependency that's isolated to a single folder in your source code, and to easily check your implementation directly into your VC.

None of that is accidental - the Node developers learned from languages like Ruby and Python, where gems and packages would be installed globally to the system, not locally to your project. They wanted a system that got rid of the majority of peer dependencies.

Jump outside of the web world and you'll see the same trend in the broader software ecosystem as well. The big hotness around Linux packaging right now is Flatpack, which is mostly copying Node's strategy of bundling dependencies into the app and then de-duplicating them after installation. Docker is an even more extreme example of this trend.

Peer dependencies are sometimes useful, and they're an important concept. But people use them and abuse them too much. They sound like they should be a good idea, so developers often don't realize the downsides until after they've gotten bitten - and even then they often just assume they were using a bad library or something.

9 out of 10 times you should avoid them, and you should avoid frameworks that introduce them.

[eropple]

So, two things:

I'm sorry that you've gotten bitten because it's frustrating when it happens, but "if a package requires a peer dependency,it's probably not worth using" is some cargo-cult stuff. Anything that acts as a extension system (coded to an interface) should use the project it's extending as a peerDependency. They are not "global variables", they're interfaces. It's what you're writing against! If you end up in dependency hell because of them, that means your dependencies are not speaking to the same interface, and that means you need to resolve the problem. Which can suck, I guess, having to actually do some work as a programmer, but somehow I think we'll all muddle through. Because the alternative is to silently have different APIs that will later break because the extended system has changed, and that is rather worse than actually knowing what's going on in your system.

React is a system that exists to be extended. Peer dependencies exist to facilitate this. Understanding one's tools makes cargo-cult sweeping-statement fears about milquetoast stuff really just unnecessary.

Flatpak is whatever (it's fancy /opt, that's fine) but, "jumping outside the web world", I'll put on my platform-architecture-is-my-actual-real-job hat right now and point out that Docker, while certainly appropriate for some use cases, is, for example, happy to cost you money in production when your big ol' app (shouts to my 4GB-heap-before-taking-a-request Ruby clients) can't copy-on-write. (After all, each process is supposed to be isolated, right? I mean, that's what people think...) There are real drawbacks to this approach, it's orthogonal to actually writing code, and the analogy doesn't really hold besides.

[danShumway]

There is not a huge fundamental difference between a global variable and a global interface. That doesn't mean that interfaces are bad, but it means you should minimize the number of globally accessible interfaces that you have, and where possible opt for local interfaces that are accessible only to the classes that are extending them.

In any case, peer dependencies are a heck of a lot more than just an interface. They're a shared implementation. That's way more dangerous.

You're looking at this from the perspective of "well, my peer dependency is the interface I've blessed." What I'm saying is that for any long-lived project you are inevitably going to get parts of your implementation, interface, and toolchain wrong. It is therefore in your best interest to optimize for small, encapsulated interfaces that will be easy to remove or change later.

Unless you're working on a trivial project, you likely do not know enough about your project to bless an interface. You almost definitely don't know enough about your project to guess in advance which interface future 3rd-party dependencies will be using. You absolutely don't know enough about your project to guess whether or not your dependencies can rely on an evergreen codebase rather than a static one that you test once and then leave unchanged for the entire component lifecycle.

It's OK if you think I'm wrong about that. I probably would not have agreed with this two years ago. And you could very well be right and in two years my opinion might flip again. All of this is just opinion me, I've gone out of my way to say that none of what I'm talking about is a universal rule - you are going to need to share at least some environment code with your dependencies.

But it's usually true. You don't need to join a cargo cart to understand that some ideas tend to be better than others on average. It's not that I don't understand my tools, it's that I understand that tools evolve.

[scotty79]

> But it took a lot of work to convince people that it [JQuery] was unnecessary.

First it took about a decade of browser and ECMA very intensive development to actually make it unnecessary.

> it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project.

Give it a decade for the web "components" to actually become composable and for inventive and useful native language built-in solutions to state management to happen before you start advocating people out of React. Until then telling people they might not need React is not a step forward but backward. Imagine people saying "you might not need jQuery" in times where IE reigned and browsers were wildly incompatible.

[jimmaswell]

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.

[isostatic]

Indeed. I occasionally write a webbased tool to deal with a specific task (say formatting some form of codec data, or a simple dashboard for a specific event, or a small config generator, or whatever), userbase is in the <10 users (not concurrent) range, I don't give a stuff about scaling. I care that the code is in a repo (git, svn, whatever), is versioned (deb, rpm, whatever), and deploys cleanly.

I could learn and use $latest_thing, and maybe it would be great. That will triple the time taken to develop, but whatever. However in a couple of years time when I come to need to write something else, $latest_thing will be old hat, and replaced by $shiny_and_new. Rather than having 10 years of nice simple code based on jquery, I get some based on Angular, some on React, some on Vue, some on Meteor, or whatever.

I'm not a programmer, I'm not a wireman, and I'm not a carpenter. I program in the same way I'll run a network cable or get a screwdriver out, it's a tool I can use to solve a specific task. I like tools that are the same, year in, year out.

That's not to say the latest frameworks aren't all great, if you're building something for a million users and want to take advantage of shiny new features that's great, but for those that aren't, there's still a place for boring old things in a large part of the computer industry.

[tracker1]

Take a look at zepto (or another jquery-like library), add some feature detection for IE polyfills, and switch to using fetch for ajax calls. Unless you're using a lot of jQuery dependencies, you'll cut your download size by more than half for most browsers/users.

I'd never say don't use jQuery, and it does support some options for a minimal footprint, still there's smaller options that probably have all you need.

[3131s]

It irks me that Javascript didn't just adopt the best parts of JQuery.

[vinceguidry]

There are still things you can only do with jQuery, I can't think of a better Swiss Army knife for small tasks.

[ape4]

For example, fetch() is built into browsers now but it doesn't have all the features of $.ajax()

[mxschumacher]

it irks me to use common functions such as selectors and Ajax in jQuery that are much, much slower than their native counterparts

[Waterluvian]

Yes that's really a great way of seeing it. Jquery kind of graduated to obsolescence as many of its useful features made it into core JS.

When querySelector and ES6 came about, I found myself not needing jquery by default.

[jiggliemon]

jQuery was never bad. As a tool it was fantastic at what it did.

But jQuery wasn’t just a tool, it was also community. What that community did/perpetuated was some pretty bad and ill advised practices. Plugins for everything - the old $.sum(2,2) joke applies here. DOM for state. Even sanctioned projects like jQuery UI were guilty of some terrible, awful practices.

That said, React isn’t the new jQuery, it’s the new Backbone. Backbone lacked so much - and did so little - that it’s deficiencies needed to be made up for by “other” tooling. As a result, there was O(n) ways to “Backbone” – making backbone apps very difficult to study/build/maintain.

React is fine. The community just needs to coalesce.

Edit: typing on my phone; and am lazy

[tracker1]

I think a lot of that does happen with React. Before Redux there were so many Flux-like libraries. material-ui and react-bootstrap are very widely used for UI/UX baseline. There are a ton of options for everything, for me it comes down to the following.

react, redux, thunks (with async functions), fetch, material-ui ... those will get you a LONG way to where you need to be with react.

[alfredxing]

I agree jQuery was very useful early on, especially since it abstracted cross-browser differences and APIs.

However in my experience, a couple of things were key to creating a negative view of jQuery:

1. Security and unsafe defaults, for example: evaluating remote JavaScript by default [1]; and unsafe DOM parsing by default [2]

2. Not really to blame on jQuery, but its ease of use for DOM manipulation led to programming patterns that aren't easily scalable, for both code and performance

[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-9251 [2] http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.parseHTML/

[hrktb]

To be fair, when jQuery was growing up PHP with magic auto global variables was the fury.

Times were different

[natecavanaugh]

I think by 2006 magic auto globals was already off by default (4.2, which was released in 2002, was the one that turned it off, and though 4.2 was still widely used by the time jQuery came about, register_globals was considered bad practice in general by at least 2004, if not even earlier).

[hrktb]

good point. Your timeline is accurate, and while PHP installs tend to be out of date and people following tutorials would just turn off security features, by 2006 the trend should have been in decline, yes.

More than anything, the crazy thing for me is that jQuery seemed to have been there from the wake of the web, when it came out only one year before the iPhone.

[ksec]

Well kids these days. They said webkit is the new IE, and said the IE era was IE7. Sigh

I cant even name a similar piece of software in web development history that is as important as jQuery.

Despite Web development as a whole, back end or front end is still no where near being good enough, it is still many times better then the old days.

[vezycash]

>cant even name a similar piece of software in web development history that is as important as jQuery.

Php?

[irrational]

Nah, there were always tons of alternatives to PHP. What real alternatives were there to jQuery? There were none.

[molf]

I know this is a rhetorical question, but Prototype.js was pretty similar to jQuery; although jQuery won the popularity contest.

[jexah]

I don't presume to be an expert on history (only entered the webdev domain in 2010), but didn't prototype come out at least a couple of years after jQuery?

[FroshKiller]

Prototype was released like a year before jQuery.

[mappu]

Mootools had a fighting chance.

[vezycash]

Javascript is irreplaceable to the web

[spc476]

Netscape navigator?

[kpil]

Php is important in the way it exemplifies the total failure of the software industry to take advantage of it's 40-50 years of accumulated knowledge...

[bmelton]

> I cant even name a similar piece of software in web development history that is as important as jQuery.

Apache?

[irrational]

There were other web servers, there weren't other jQuerys.

[emilsedgh]

I get the point you're mentioning but jQuery was there with Prototype.js and Mootools.

[nathell]

And Dojo and YUI and a couple of others.

[kyle-rb]

But Apache was born before jQuery, and continues to live on after jQuery (should have) died.

[lr4444lr]

Agreed. Furthermore, a lot of those tasks were downright unnecessarily painful and tedious time sinks, e.g. browser agnostic control when the ecosystem was much more fragmented and HTML5 more nascent. Also, jQuery's documentation was solid, and it was very easily extensible.

[shams93]

Back when browsers were wildly incompatible jquery was a life saver. Sure you could do painful dom code and then have all kinds of libraries that have to be loaded in the right order to support all browsers or you could just include jquery. Now in the era of the progressive web app SPA jquery is outdated. Even for low level dom its still outdated because modern browsers follow standards really tightly especially compared to the bad old days. Frameworks are starting to get outdated in the face of tools like Svelte as well as Polymer 3. You can pull off a SPA with Polymer 3 on modern browsers with no shims at this point, except maybe shadow dom, but Polymer 3 has selective shimming so you don't have to download one huge shim file.

[Vinnl]

jQuery also predates standards such as querySelectorAll and fetch, so no, it wasn't just compensating for browser incompatibilities; it also provided a far more pleasant API.

React is in a similar boat - it provides a far more pleasant experience keeping the DOM in sync with your application state, in a way that Web Components don't (although they have other advantages that make them great when used together with React).

[sametmax]

Insulting is really what i felt too. Simplicity, size, ubiquity, plug and play are the opposite of react.

I would understand if comparing VueJS with jquey. Even if they are very different, the philosophy is the same: a small elegant easy to use versatil tool.

[BlackjackCF]

Agreed. I LOVED jQuery and I could do some serious damage with it before Angular/React came along.

[TomK32]

Hey, those young kids just don't know how frontend development was before jQuery.

[oliyoung]

> 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.

Yet, Sara is neither of those, she's a well respected developer, who's work with CSS and SVG is world-class.

If she's using jQuery as a comparison she's doing it from a place of experience and knowledge

[freyir]

Who is? CSS and SVG are great, but how is her javascript? Neglecting the role that jQuery played is foolish, and even respected developers can say foolish things now and then.

[jhanschoo]

Unfortunately the shortness of the tweet leaves much to interpretation. Perhaps the analogy she was getting at is simply that it's being used in solutions that do not benefit from it.

[tracker1]

I know what a pain Prototype.js and others got to be... jQuery was a lot cleaner, though in retrospect, I wish they'd passed the context in as a property, instead of relying on "this", also wish they'd passed it as an already jQuery wrapped representation.

[cup-of-tea]

Is jQuery unnecessary because the functionality is built into js now? Or browsers? Or other libraries? If it's libraries, are those libraries providing a superset of jQuery or are they just better?

[Vinnl]

Yes, the DOM API's have greatly improved and are well-supported among browsers now, so jQuery is no longer needed for that. React doesn't solve the problem of inconsistent and unwieldy browser API's (which isn't a problem any more), but of a clean architecture for web applications.

[yread]

jQuery is not that necessary anymore because difference between browsers' js implementations are not that big. You still have small differences in events but nothing like it used to be

[kyle-rb]

As someone who learned web dev in the era after jQuery was marked by many as deprecated, I started to resent it mainly because of all the StackOverflow posters that give jQuery answers to JavaScript questions. (Plus the cases where CSS would suffice.)

[jaydenseric]

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.

[superfrank]

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.

[jimmaswell]

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).

[Izkata]

> Also, a slow loading JS lib wasn't as much of an issue 5-7 years ago when jQuery was really in its heyday.

Not to mention it was recommended to point your "src=" to one of the common cdns, so it would likely already be in the user's cache from some other website that used the same jquery version.

[cm2187]

I wish typical webpages would only pull 35kb of resources.

[agumonkey]

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.