Ask HN: How's your recent experience with the Bootstrap and jQuery stack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How's your recent experience with the Bootstrap and jQuery stack?

5 pointss1k3s10 comments

I'm a backend developer and my only frontend experience is with Tailwind and vanilla JS. I want to start working on a few side projects that I'll eventually try to sell. I was looking for libraries or frameworks that would help me build these things, but I'm not going to go through the entire learning path of Vue and React, so I remembered working with jQuery and Bootstrap 7-8 years ago maybe and I'm considering using these.

Do you have any recent experiences with this stack? I see both of them have recent releases and they seem actively maintained. jQuery UI also has a ton of useful plugins. Should I start with this stack? Would you recommend something else?

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Just a note that Bootstrap 5 no longer requires jQuery and if you liked using Bootstrap in the past, you can probably get along fine using it now. I'm sure others will point out alternatives and reasons why you might not want to dismiss using Vue or Tailwind but as long as you are comfy using bootstrap and don't mind that your website will likely look like you are using bootstrap you should be fine.

Yeah, I don't mind being labelled as a "bootstrap website". Now that I'm thinking, I could probably drop Bootstrap and use jQuery + Tailwind. I'm much more comfortable with Tailwind and I find it more flexible.

The beauty of Bootstrap is in the name. Need to get something up and running? And not look like a design-blind (BE) engineer built it? That's Bootstraps sweet spot. Mind you, it gets used for quite a bit more, but ultimately that was the intent.

If that's what you need, use it. Then, later, replace it. But in the shortterm it's about having one less thing (i.e., FE) to worry about.

fwiw, the same still applies to jQuery. Perhaps not THE long term answer. But in the MVP short term it can make sense.

Go with Tailwind for the CSS Framework.

I would use something other than jQuery.

What's your backend framework?

Your backend framework might have something like Liveview/Phoenix, Hotwire/Rails Livewire/Laravel that would make it super easy to develop an interactive front end without vue or react.

Just an option to look at.

Coming from Bootstrap, is there a good learning resource for Tailwind layouts? Bootstrap's grid is very obvious/explicit (rows and col) whereas Tailwind has more magic. Thanks!

The official docs are really good. As a BE dev I find Tailwind to be really easy to use. Here is the grid doc: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/grid-template-columns

If you know jQuery that's great, it is still the perfect drop-in libruary. It is stable, smaller than ever. You can do the same in vanilla javascript or jump into a framework ecosystem if you need to later.

jQuery UI feels outdatex

If all you need is a basic grid and typography you might consider Skeleton (http://getskeleton.com/.)

I use bootstrap3 on multiple websites (because it includes glyphicons + jquery). Works fine.

jQuery is still wonderful.

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