Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

The core message is good but I think Rebecca's obsession with jQuery just kills here ability to deliver it. jQuery is not a problem. jQuery's popularity is not a problem. Complex applications are the problem. People not knowing how to structure complex applications are the problem.

Let's see the context there: jQuery is wildly popular, but it is the right tool for the job in most cases. Not all web pages jQuery is used on are webapps. Not all webapps are GMail. Yup, jQuery is "DOM, AJAX and effects" library which is great for trivial tasks. A lot of tasks are trivial.

But there is no "jQuery divide", like there was no "Prototype divide" some six years ago. These are just tools that can be misused. Sorry, Rebecca, but if dojo were as popular as jQuery is the JavaScript land would not be any better than it is now. It would be just a different tool misused, that's all.

The second point she is way wrong (again, IMHO) is the API. Don't you ever underestimate the importance of the good API. When you have tools X, Y, Z which more or less do the same with more or less the same performance, API is the main differentiating factor it's the think you write and look at the whole day. jQuery's API is awesome for many reasons. Dojo's is not.

Structuring complex applications is hard, no matter what language you use, it's not some trouble only JavaScript has. True, JavaScript comes with a couple more complications in that regard but these are minor in the context of the problem.

What she is right about it's the lack of good examples going beyond the basics. But I think the reason for that is that we are just on the way to find out what works reasonably well. It will come, I hope.

So my point is: stop talking about jQuery and dojo. Talk about the core of the problem (and any js lib is not the core).

Oh, and I would like to see Rebecca's take on backbone.js.

I appreciate your feedback and understand that previous posts of mine have framed this as a jQuery vs. Dojo debate; I tried particularly hard not to do so in this post, and I think you'd be rather hard-pressed to say that this post was a "jQuery vs. Dojo" diatribe. Yes, it linked to my Berlin slides, but that's simply because a post in response to them is what got this whole post percolating in my head to begin with.

The fact is, though, jQuery and Dojo are the two libraries with which I am quite familiar, and so they are the two libraries I am most able to compare. Having used both, it is easy to see the weaknesses of ... both! I truly believe there is a "jQuery divide" -- there are people who think jQuery is what there is to know of JavaScript, and that it can solve all of their problems; then there are the people who know there is more, either because they have always known or because, like me, they've discovered it through some painful mistakes.

What I am asking for, in this post and in my Berlin talk, is for the people who know there is more to take some responsibility for bringing the others up to speed, to show people what can be done if you leave behind the "get some elements, do something with them" mentality.

None of this is to say that jQuery is not a useful tool, and the right tool in so many situations! I have used it, I have contributed to it, I have taught it, I have recommended it. Its API is seductive and its API is a huge contribution it has made to the JS landscape. The point, though, is that it's just an API -- an API that can be and has been be readily replicated. My experience has been that other libraries' APIs can have their own elegance, once you get used to them. The problem is that the appeal of jQuery's API I think is what can lead people to keep approaching problems in a DOM-centric way long after it makes sense. I do not fault jQuery for this, but I think as a wider JavaScript community we do well to discuss -- and not in an us v. them way! -- other viable approaches that exist.

Finally: Backbone is a viable entry in the field, and I am eager to see more complex examples (to-do list applications fall far short of this) that use it. I haven't used it personally, but I mostly like what I see and have heard good things about it. Unfortunately it had just come out right before my Berlin talk, and while I may have mentioned it in my actual talk, it isn't in the slides. (That said, I do cringe a tad that its examples suggest (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Model) that a "Sidebar" is a thing that should be a model.)

Oops -- that's a very good point about the Model example being a bad one -- I was just trying to use something visible, in order to see the "change" event binding in action. Perhaps we should swap it out for something more model-y.

These days, if you're looking for complex Backbone examples, there's a bounty to choose from:

* http://getflow.com

* http://m.soundcloud.com

* http://basecamphq.com/mobile

* http://getcloudapp.com

* http://www.documentcloud.org/public

Thank you for these :) I admit the last time I went hunting was a while ago, it's good to see so many more. For various reasons, the templated widget part of Dojo made it the right choice for my current project, but I strongly suspect a Backbone project will be in my future, either for fun or profit.

One other question: are there Backbone examples small enough to digest but large enough to be more authentic than a to-do list? This is where I struggle to come up with good teaching examples -- a whole real-world app is simply too much to take in when one is trying to transition to a JS app mindset (and of course the code is usually minified/obfuscated), but examples like to-do lists are so simple that they don't show how a tool addresses actual real-world problems.

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