jQuery is not awesome.
It was awesome 15 years ago. Now it's completely outdated. It's very hard to reason about DOM that can be manually changed by any random piece of code. That's why declarative solutions like React/Vue/Svelte are so much better.
It was awesome 15 years ago. Now it's completely outdated. It's very hard to reason about DOM that can be manually changed by any random piece of code. That's why declarative solutions like React/Vue/Svelte are so much better.
I don't mean to be overly snarky here, but as someone who's just totally out of their depth in modern web UI - is that why people like these frameworks? Because they're very easy to reason about? I've generally found them to be mountains and mountains of boilerplate and spaghetti, but I really do not have a wide base of experience to pull from on this topic.
Prior to React (and similar libraries), DOM manipulation was generally done in a mutating, effectful way. With React (and similar), if a thing is behaving strangely, I just need to go to the component that rendered said thing, and I can almost always find the problem.
React complexity is often conflated with things like Next JS or other SPA solutions. React was originally meant to be a library for building small components that you drop into an otherwise static websites. But people usually don't talk about React unless they're talking about whole sites being in React. For that reason, I think its complexity is exaggerated.
More importantly, what the commenter is referring to is the fact that you are encouraged to write Jquery code that can break if you decide to move a div or change a class name. The workflow of CSS selectors is fine for small apps, but can lead to hard to track bugs down the road. It can be avoided if you make a lot of unique IDs. But otherwise you're screwed. There's no scoping. You technically have to read every piece of Jquery code before changing any other code, html, or css, because you could break half the site depending on what people were depending on. There's no IDE support telling you what is selecting what. Events are not colocated on the things they attach to, they could be anywhere.
I can update a React component and be sure that the only places it affects are the places its rendered. And I can get type checking on every input going into a component. That's just way better to me.
I still use JQuery at work, but I usually dread it. And people say JQuery is "smaller" but I would still prefer something like Svelte to Jquery if that's a concern.
I can take or leave Vue, I don't really notice a huge difference between it and other component frameworks.
All my jQuery components were self contained and you just initialized them with $(‘[data-date-picker]’).datePicker(). It is pretty obvious to anyone looking at the code that if you remove “data-date-picker”, it stopped being a date picker.
Personally, I do find their style of modularization abhorrent. As you said, it's full of boilerplate, it's also full of dependencies, and the worst sin in a software architecture: they don't enable you to specify a simple interface between modules. But they do solve the lack of structure you get when all the code talks to each other freely through the DOM.
Give it a shot, it's stupid-easy, and that's not downplaying anything either.
Thankfully it's pretty easy to align a team with a little time and learning what everyone wants.
I think the parents point is that many websites don't need to change all that much DOM manually, automatically, or in any fashion. And I would agree with them, that for when the only 'dynamic' part of your site is one or two simple forms, and maybe a little carousel of images, jQuery may be perfectly awesome.
Guess what? Spooky action at a distance continues with reducers, custom hooks, custom injected contexts, etc, etc.
edit: also its way more lightweight than React/Vue/Svelte i don't necessarily disagree you shouldn't reach for jQuery if you have a dynamic page (something like uhtml+preact signals would be good if you have fair bit of rendering logic going on) but I would say you should totally try seeing how far you can get with jQuery instead of Svelte/React/Vue on simple pages.
jQuery is also pure JS whereas Svelte is Typescript so it may be more difficult to debug/hack if your primarily JS coder.
I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, but maintenance may mean developers who don’t know or care for modern web don’t have to learn something new.
Reasoning about the DOM structure has almost never been an issue in my almost 20 years of professionally doing this junk. The complexity has always been elsewhere.
I spent years maintaining front-end code built by devs who believe their way of doing things was better than what's popular in the industry and I disagree about jQuery entirely.
jQuery is a low level tool and always ends up biting people as the project grows.
jQuery + the DOM are well known frameworks. ;P