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by thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
If you have even medium complexity you're better off using something like React with Babel or Typescript. Much more sane way of event handling than JQuery, and no mucking with HTML by hand.

I agree with JQuery for the most simple sites, but React+transpiler will give you much better compatibility
4 comments
EB66 2892 days ago
It sounds like you're saying using jQuery and a modern component-ized front-end framework are mutually exclusive. jQuery and modern front-end components can go together very easily -- albeit not specifically with React and Vue.

Our company built an in-house front-end framework heavily inspired by React and Vue. The components built using the framework work with or without jQuery. No manual DOM manipulations, one-way data binding, sane state management, templating, etc. Many of us prefer to use jQuery because of how compact and expressive the syntax is.

It really surprises me how many people think that jQuery === old school manual DOM manipulations. It definitely doesn't have to be that way.

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ergo14 2893 days ago
Thing is react is only compatible with react ;-)
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
It's extremely easy to use React in small parts of the page and spread it out over time. It's a couple lines of code to init React in a div and fully supported. You can even communicate between React bits spread across the page.

React also let's you mark areas/divs within its domain as "don't touch this". So in those areas you can use things like that old map widget you love so much, without resorting to iframes

Angular is a huge fail in this regard. Zero support for mixing with "non angular" pages.

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EugeneOZ 2893 days ago
All what you describe in this commentary is much more easy to implement with just jQuery. Your logic more looks like "I can do it with React so it means I should and I believe it's the best tool".
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girvo 2892 days ago
Until you’ve got some moderately complex state and infrastructure to handle it, where you end up recreating the whole State -> Render loop of React in jQuery. I recently did this. It works, well, and with less bugs than most hacky jQuery DOM modification, but by the end I was pining for any other modern view library that already solved this. Same reason I used to pine for jQuery on some projects.
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feverdream 2893 days ago
Can you elaborate on this? In my limited experience with React, it takes over your whole application, or at least the whole page. How do you mark areas as "don't touch this"?
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kroltan 2893 days ago
I'm not sure on the "don't touch this" part, but in regards to "taking over the application", it certainly doesn't.

React's entry point is the `ReactDOM.render` function, which takes some React elements, and a root node. that root node can be _any_ DOM node (Actually no idea if you can mount React into a inline SVG, but at least any _HTML_ node you certainly can). You can also have multiple `ReactDOM.render` calls, no problem at all.

That initial React element can very well take values and callbacks from your Angular or whatever application.

It can get messy if you nest `ReactDOM.render` within roots that are managed by React, but so would nesting any other UI framework, but the use cases for that are... Exuberantly exotic, to say the least.

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mhink 2893 days ago
So, the way to look at it is that you “mount” a React application at a specific part of the DOM. Anything under that point is managed by React components.

Usually, people have a single “mount point” very close to the <body> element, and a single script file whose primary purpose is to call ReactDOM.render to “mount” a React component representing their application at that point.

However, that doesn’t prevent you from having DOM outside that mount point, and it doesn’t prevent you from having code which does other things that don’t have anything to do with the React-managed part of the page. This is a great way to migrate a legacy application to React: you choose one small section of your page to replace with React, and then have the remainder of your page interact with it by 1.) choosing when to call ReactDOM.render again to ask it to update, and 2.) passing in callbacks so the React ”mini-app” can notify the rest of your application when something happens.

You can go the other way, too, although it’s a little less safe. If you have a React component which renders, say, a <div> with no children, you can get a handle to the DOM element itself and interact with it just like you would in a non-React application. The only constraint here is that you have to make sure to clean up e.g. event handlers and release references to those elements if something causes the “owner” React component to unmount. This is how people make wrapper libraries which let you use non-React-based libraries using React components. (I’ve done this in a side project where I had a huge number homogenous DOM elements to work with, and found that managing them myself was much more performant than trying to run them through React’s model.)

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disiplus 2893 days ago
i have something like that in one of my projects, there is "inbox" in one of my apps, it is handled with react, and the header, and top menu are outside of react and generated from backend. it works great. the only problem i had is in the developing, the thing that i did is i developed the inbox feature separately and then im copying the dist to my app on compile.
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
I haven't had to do so much myself, but the docs have decent info on how to obtain it. https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.ht...
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testvox 2893 days ago
React components mount to any element you want. And everything they do will happen within that element if you are using react conventionally. There is no issue mounting components alongside/inside legacy apps.
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FLUX-YOU 2893 days ago
Angular is a nightmare for complex UI interactions for components that are spread out.

I'm sure experienced people know how to do that properly, but it's really difficult starting out.

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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
Angular's learning curve is the worst I've ever seen. We mostly use it because "Enterprise" but I prefer React when we get permission for that reason.

Too much abstraction, too much magic. It's possible to do just about anything but the docs are sparse enough that you'll be crawling through github PR's and source to figure out how to achieve it sometimes

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EugeneOZ 2893 days ago
Angular is an amazing tool for building reusable components and interoperation between them is pretty easy to implement (just use "input/output" handlers). I'm not saying it just to say something opposite, it is really my opinion and it's what I do almost every day.
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skeoh 2893 days ago
Can you elaborate on this? I've integrated React into Angular and Ember projects in the past with no compatibility issues.
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ergo14 2892 days ago
Did the "foreign" elements stamp out react elements or interact with their properties?
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skeoh 2889 days ago
I tried not to have multiple frameworks controlling the same DOM elements. It would usually be a React component mounted to a DOM element controlled by a component in another framework.
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ergo14 2886 days ago
Exactly, that is my problem, if a react component state is altered by "outside world", weird things can happen. So you actually avoided interoperability between solutions.
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samueldavid 2893 days ago
why not Vue?
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lucasmullens 2893 days ago
"something like React" includes Vue.
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interlocutor 2893 days ago
React is great for rendering (and updating after initial render), but if your app is highly interactive then jQuery makes things easier even when using React for rendering.
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
You generally don't mix react and JQuery. The event system + JSX makes jQuery obsolete.

Having worked in complex interactive React/Angular apps as well as ones using JQuery, nobody would ever offer me enough to use JQuery again for this use case. They would have to double my pay for all the pain

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interlocutor 2893 days ago
Show me a dropdown menu written in React and I'll show you how you can simplify the code significantly by using jQuery in addition to React.
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
Development with React is becoming similar to old school event driven desktop apps, thankfully.

If I want a fancy drop-down with accessibility support and theming etc, there's probably 50 different libraries with components I can pull in and use with little fuss. A few lines of code to import and register event listeners.

I was a huge user of jQuery for years, and it also has quite nice UI libraries. But the power of React is the standardized scaffold and lifecycle. I can pull in UI components from almost any library and use them intuitively. Mix and match them on the same page.

Trying to do that in jQuery will quickly drag you to hell.

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mariusmg 2892 days ago
>Trying to do that in jQuery will quickly drag you to hell.

Can you elaborate on this please ? I've used lots of libraries with jquery and haven't encountered problems.

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thermodynthrway 2892 days ago
Easy to cause it by combining bootstrap components and JQueryUI.

In React you can "scope" a components CSS so none of the styling leaks out

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squiggleblaz 2893 days ago
Can you be more concrete?

If you want some specific code to criticise, there's dozens of dropdown menu widgets available: here's one I found in Google https://github.com/react-component/menu since I've never actually had reason to use a js/html drop down menu widget.

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interlocutor 2893 days ago
Here's one that uses jQuery. See how much simpler it is? The one you found does have more functionality, but try rewriting the one I found in React without using jQuery. I guarantee it will be much more complicated.

https://github.com/wisercoder/uibuilder/blob/master/SimpleDe...

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moretti 2892 days ago
It’s interesting that you find this “simpler”. One of the great advantages of React is that is declarative, it’s easy to understand how a component will render given a set of (props, state). Your example is quite the opposite, the render method violates this principle and each event handler manipulates the DOM using a ref. I’d call this spaghetti-React.
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thermodynthrway 2893 days ago
It's not about how complex the component is. In my experience what matters is how easy it is to use. With React it's easy to build a world in a teacup, and that's mostly a good thing.

For "regular CRUD developers", the vast majority of us, I have zero concern about how big or crazy component code is until it's so huge it impacts page size. I'll use the easiest most feature complete library out there.

React does encapsulation like jQuery never could. I don't care if I have this vanta black box on my page as long as it's easy to mess with and gets the job done

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ben-schaaf 2892 days ago
What do you even need javascript for in a dropdown?
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KevanM 2892 days ago
How else are you going to add back in the accessibility you've broken by building it with JavaScript?
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petilon 2892 days ago
For filtering as you type?
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boubiyeah 2892 days ago
you are seriously mistaken about react then. The whole point of MV libs is that you maintain a model (domain and/or UI) and the UI just redraws itself. JQuery is 100% not needed even for the most complicated React apps.
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petilon 2892 days ago
When you have a highly interactive component you're going to need to make a lot of DOM calls to get the current state of the elements and so on. jQuery makes this easy. The benefits of jQuery over making raw DOM calls have been mentioned by many people here already, so I won't repeat them. These benefits of jQuery don't go away even in a React app.
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