jQuery 3.6.2

I rather like jQuery as it just patches over so much of the DOM API, which offends my sensibilities of what a "good API" should look like. I don't think the jQuery API is perfect, but it's a lot better.

But I never really liked jQuery UI, either as a user or developer. As a user, the whole "desktop semantics in your browser" is one of those things that was worth trying 15 years ago, but it mostly never really worked all that well, and pretty much everyone has dropped it.

As a developer I feel jQuery UI is too complex for what it does, partly because of the above.

At any rate, jQuery and jQuery UI are two entirely different projects.

My job has a lot of little customers with little projects and some older ones were made with jquery and we keep on keeping on. Why not? Also if we have to make similar projects we branch from older ones. So some of our current development uses jquery which raises some eyebrows but nothing like using 95% battle hardened code than starting fresh because…

Why not components from a React library like Material UI?

jQuery UI is "in a maintenance state" and "older long-standing bugs may not get fixed" I'm afraid

https://blog.jqueryui.com/2022/07/jquery-ui-1-13-2-released/

> date pickers

<input type="date"> is too rough I'm guessing? I'm not exactly sure where it falls short personally.

I don't use much jQuery any more but I thought it papered over a few bugs in browser bugs (I vaguely recall jQuery having to work around a DOM selector bug in mobile Safari in the last seven or so years).

One thing that gets forgotten about jQuery is that there's a tremendous library of very evolved components in its ecosystem. Sure, "you don't need jQuery" is true, but when you go hunting for components you'd rather not write yourself, man is there still some gravity there.

You ask yourself, "do I feel like writing a calendar selector widget today?" Trade some vanity and JavaScript puritanism and the question becomes "what color should I style it?"

The API jQuery gives you is still so much nicer than regular javascript, even with modern ECMAScript 7+...

While we're at it - Bootstrap (and similar css frameworks) are still much nicer to use than native CSS, even with modern CSS3 and flexbox...

It's almost like the designers for these native-API's look at what the community uses, and then decide to do something similar, but different just because.

I've not used it in a new project for a long time, but I often still work on projects with legacy jQuery code.

The main reason to still use it imo it is simply that a lot of devs are familiar with the API and they have really good docs.

While I prefer vanilla JS for JS-light projects, I'm also aware of some cross-browser weirdness and combability issues you might run into with a vanilla JS project. The nice thing JQuery is that you know it will work as expected on the all browsers it supports so you don't need to worry about cross-browser testing your code. It also makes certain things easier to do like basic JS animations.

The main reason care about the latest releases is that they patch security issues from time to time.

Yes. Technically you could always use native JS in place of jQuery and have the same functionality. But jQuery's power came from abstracting away some of the messier and more complicated elements and giving developers a more intuitive set of tools. Some part of this are less necessary today than when jQuery v1 came out (like `querySelectorAll()` vs `$()`), but other parts are still enormously helpful (like `$.ajax()`). So like always, it's a trade off. But it's still one that comes up as worth it as often as not.

I find it much quicker to write and neater to read than vanilla JS. I optimise afterwards and might consider swapping it out but it's usually low down the list of performance issues. Although it can be a bigger issue if you don't know how select things and store those selections efficiently with it.

jQuery is like, comfort food for me? Used to use jQuery for everything and now the world's moved on. I wouldn't want to do a large project today in jQuery, but I kinda miss the simpler projects that I used to do all the time with a smaller toolbox.

I used jQuery earlier this year.

I am not a web developer I learnt HTML in the 90's (When Frames and Tables were the way to write web pages). I have not kept up to date with current State of the art in web development. I know enough about JavaScript to read source code and kind of understand what it is doing but don't know anything about best practices or the 'proper' way to write it.

I needed to throw together a simple webform to submit a date as one of the inputs. I was having problems getting it to work consistently across different browsers.

One of the issues I was having was I needed the date to be in the Australian date format (DD/MM/YYYY) but one browser (I can't remember which Edge maybe??) kept insisting on using US style dates MM/DD/YYYY it caused me a lot of frustration maybe I just didn't know the correct phrase to search google for but I could not work out how to make the browsers built in calendar picker force the date to be in a specific format.

So I just used the JQuery calendar picker took me two seconds and problem solved.

Apology accepted, and absolutely! Myself and two other developers just kicked off a very non-tivial, data-heavy application for a Dow 30 that will be used by a maximum of 12,000 users. Using jquery will help us avoid a lot of thinking and testing time with the whole "gee, how would I do that in vanilla, let me look that up" process.

Bootstrap 4 uses jquery, bootstrap 5 was released (not beta) May 5, 2021. So, anything started with Bootstrap 4 would use it.

I am still using jQuery because I have so many plugins such as calendars, photo galleries, video galleries, and file explorer type trees that are all progressively enhanced, it would be a ton of work to rebuild everything. I think jQuery is still does a great job for progressive enhancement of CMS/informational type websites.

jQuery is more popular than React by pretty much any metric you can find

It always could be done in JavaScript, jQuery is written on it after all.

It’s just that it’s a lot better and easier. The fact that we haven’t standardized on jQuery’s API is one of the greatest missed opportunities in the field.

i don't intentionally write code using JQuery anymore, and find it not very inconvenient to avoid for the most part, even when writing "jquery style" JS -- which I do. Browser API's in recent browsers are good enough.

But I'm still using some dependencies that need jquery.

I honestly expect I'll never be able to get rid of it.

Yeah a good few years ago, before I had learnt about frameworks like React, I used JQuery for one of my projects. Once I learned about React, I decided to rewrite this project using that instead, and afterwards I felt that the React version was very obviously the superior version. I just feel like we now have better options, and I still really like React's way of handling state in a moreso functional way.

Yep. It is the first package I install on a new project. Followed by React.

I only encounter it when maintaining old codebases. Never for anything new

Yes. I do still use it.

I feel like React and JQuery approach things so differently that it almost never should be a question of “Should I use React or JQuery?”…

Why couldn't you use both? I've never had issues with them together.

Tbh this is not a problem of react

"Decoupling" is not a phrase I'd personally use to describe a benefit of React.

Every React example I've seen is a horrific-looking mixture of JavaScript, XML, and HTML all muddled together into a nasty-looking component system.

When I was learning front-end development it was an absolute cardinal sin to mix markup, JavaScript, and styling together. Now that seems like the standard practice and I still can't look past it.

Because it hails from a different and terrible era. It's easy to forget the impact that jQuery had in front-end development.

JS in ~20020 - Use onclick handlers to respond to user interaction. JS in ~2004 - Use jQuery to decouple your JS from your HTML in separate files. JS in ~2008 - We invented our own onclick handler, embed your JS in your HTML it's fine now.

EDIT Spelling

Someone just today was complaining that css doesn’t have contains. Something as simple as that makes jquery useful. It’s also not a huge library and extremely powerful. It gets a bad rap.

Alpine.js has been a wonderful new tool in my arsenal.

I prefer lightweight tools that solve big problems while still staying small/simple. Alpine.js really hits that balance for me. The fact I'm able to drop it in without a single Node.js/etc build tooling is astounding (esbuild, rome, etc). I really prefer how it stays true to vanilla JS/general web development while also bringing modern attribute-driven reactivity to the table.