Regardless of whether something is a hobby project that you want to only touch a couple times a year or a big project with dozens of developers, having your platform deprecated under your feet and being forced to do migration work sucks.
Vue is now on version 3 within 10 years. That means anyone who relied on v1 has had their work churned away under their feet, twice.
3 was initially going to be a big change, but after a lot of community resistance, they decided to make the reworked API entirely optional so people wouldn't be forced to make changes. AFAIK this is still the case and the classic variant (Options API) is still fully supported.
I was thinking about doing some stuff for a hobby project recently and as a mostly back-end engineer, I am very out of date for most front-end code. I did a scout around, and didn't feel too impressed.
Finally last week I was thinking "I wonder what happened to jQuery", and there it was. Just as it ever was. Updated, freshened up, but completely recognisable and completely usable.
Is it new and shiny and full of awesome features? No. Do I understand it? Yes. Are there plugins for most things I need? Sure.
I feel old, but I'd rather make progress with something unfashionable than have to deal with deprecation and learning curves with something fashionable.
Hide Show
```
$(".box").hide();
$(".box").show();
vs
document.querySelector(".box").style.display = "none";
document.querySelector(".box").style.display = "block";
``` Both work. The first is more clear
const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document);
$('.box').hidden = true;
$('.box').hidden = false;
```
jQuery is designed not to fail. So if there's no `.box` on the page, jQuery will not do anything.
`querySelector` may return null, so `$('.box').hidden` will hard break your page if you're not careful enough
2. `$('.box').hide()` is just one such example.
The hilarious https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ shows that jQuery remains more consistent, concise, and composable than most things in modern browser APIs
Also, do you know if there is a jQuery-like that actually throws exceptions? Having `$('.box').hide()` tell me there is no `.box` would be pretty useful.
For development, browsers and version managers/containers are stable enough that you won't be on a deprecation treadmill. Any pressure would come from including other people on the project, which you'd get even more of with jQuery.
I appreciate the 'do what works' mindset quite a bit but I hope you'll give a modern reactive framework or library a try; I'm glad I made the change.
Mithril if you just want to drop in want a tiny, complete reactive library that doesn't require a build step--this one is most like what you might end up creating in a large jQuery app. You can understand everything from the homepage. https://mithril.js.org/
HTMX if you really like HTML conventions. This doesn't feel jQuery-like and depends on your approach to your server app. https://htmx.org/
If you were to pick just one, I think Vue would be the most rewarding.
A totally different thing than moving from Angular 1 -> 2 for example.
One of our issues is that we've used some component frameworks that also need to be migrated.
With the caveat that I don't do software engineering professionally, I recently migrated a personal Vue 1/JavaScript project to Vue 3/TypeScript, and it was mostly painless. There's a migration guide¹, and Phind and Copilot were helpful.
I also migrated our component framework, from Buefy to Oruga. Some string replacement to change component prefixes, then Typescript to help catch incorrect properties. I might have fixed several bugs in the process thanks to Typescript working better with Oruga. The only real tricky part was converting customized CSS, which was A LOT in our case, but Oruga provides a better way of overriding CSS, so it was worth the time.
Took about 2 days of me doing pure coding with a blocked calendar, plus a third day for testing and code reviews by the rest of the team.
Like others have mentioned, the biggest fear was other libs we used. We are quite conservative with that though, so want a big deal.
A couple major version upgrades in a decade seems reasonable.
And also, the work required to do those upgrades has always been relatively minimal, with a backwards path for stuff you're not ready to convert yet, but real tangible benefits for the stuff you are. I still have a few projects that are a mix of Vue 2/3 - new stuff written in 3 because it's nicer, older components not rewritten yet because they haven't needed to be touched and just still work.