Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

OK, I know a lot of folks are tired of me talking about it, but if you are interested only in UX functionality and not necessarily in learning the latest trendy tools, I have built a library that gives you a lot of what the other front-end libraries do at a fraction of the complexity:

http://intercoolerjs.org

Basically you use HTML attributes to drive AJAX requests, and render your HTML on the server side. (There are actually very good theoretical reasons for doing this[1][2].) It is built on top of jQuery and dovetails very nicely with it.

There are lots of examples here:

http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/index.html

And, again, if you are looking for simplicity in front end development, while still building a modern web application, I think it's a good option. There is no tool chain beyond what you currently use for web development.

[1] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

[2] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

I created an account to say this: thank you.

Having spent hours and hours trying to find to find my feet in the world of competing JS frameworks and gui libraries a friend said "Just search for 'declarative ajax' and click the second link". Good advice, because it led me to intercoolerjs. It's just so straightforward. Twenty or so minutes later I was back in emacs generating Django views because I knew, intuitively, what I needed to do to actually get things done.

It's hard to explain to people how quickly you can get working with it but something like:

    <a href="#" ic-target="#datadiv" ic-get-from="/latest_data/">Get Data</a>

is basically pseudocode. I love it.

Wow, after reading the docs and several examples of intercoolerjs, if you ask me to describe it with one word, it'll be "simple", two words, "no over-abstraction", three words, "easy to pickup".

I develop desktop software for Windows, but I'm also interested in the web development techs - although haven't done any real-life web apps, I have read a lot of docs about most of popular frameworks you can list here. The first framework that got me think "cool, it's natural and simple" is Angularjs 1, maybe because it's so similar to the good old Delphi's GUI framework called VCL (Visual Component Library - yes! Component!), but you all know the story - it's "killed" by angular 2 and the version 2 feels so complex and so over-engineering to me :P

Now intercooler.js gives me a feeling similar to the one when I first landed the angular 1 homepage - it's not the same of course, but I think both of them made me think "natural" and "simple".

Maybe you think, well, you are not a web dev, but trust me, I've writing software for a living for over a decades, I know the pain of a framework when being over-abstraction, over-engineering, or being bloated. KISS, is a rule that fits in all fields, I guess.

I'd never heard of intercoolerjs before, and was going to comment how introducing another framework to the discussion was counterproductive, but then wow I checked it out.

It's exactly the improvement on jQuery the OP asked for, and thus fits that mental model perfectly. It is also so logically designed it basically requires no documentation - I read the introduction and a handful of examples and thought, "shit of course it works this wasy" and could basically derive how every other feature mapped to its implementation in that moment.

Congratulations!

Ok, just spent my Sunday playing with intercooler.js library and I am so pleased right now. I have plugged that right into my flask app and got it working like butter with flask-paginate and flask-table and Ajaxified nearly all-the-things in an afternoon. I've been dreading taking this on as I could have easily lost months trying to get this-much-shit-done screwing around trying to become javascript/react/vue guru. Awesome work man, great stuff.

> Intercooler is a sturdy, quiet alternative in a web development world of noise and complexity. I'm happy with that.

love this and thanks for sharing. your intro/docs page is very well written in that it progresses very well from simple examples to more intricate examples. very well done!

Not sure if I'll ever use it, but intercooler.js would be great for many use cases (that usually end up being implemented using a hugely complicated stack).

The only reason I probably wouldn't use it is that I'm happy with just using browser APIs directly for the small stuff.

I'll just say that the examples make intercooler.js seem much more complicated than it is, until you read closely enough to realize that most of the code is Mockjax and backend implementation. You'd do well to split the view into two parts: frontend source code and server-side source code.

I work with an application that wasn't built with "new" javascript standards, so migrating everything over to the component, reactive, built standard will take us some time. In the interim, we started using Intercooler, and it's awesome. If I were starting a project fresh I don't know that I'd go this route because I like the deep customizability of a well-designed JS app, but for simplicity, Intercooler does an awesome job.

This is really clean and simple and looks like it can grow with needs. I don't think I would have come across it in the framework noise if you hadn't tied it to the issue here and spoke to it.

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