jQuery v4.0 Beta

https://blog.jquery.com/2024/02/06/jquery-4-0-0-beta/

by joshmanders • 2 years ago

569 372 2 years ago

blog.jquery.com

voidwtf• 2 years ago

In a world where many of us are actively trying to remove the last vestiges of jQuery, who is actively developing using jQuery? Genuinely curious. I’ve found that most of what I went to jQuery before is baked in now. querySelectorAll being the most powerful.

kxrm2• 2 years ago

who is actively developing using jQuery?

Yea same, I am actively trying to get rid of jQuery, but my guess would be people get used to working with a tool and there just isn't enough desire or a business case to get rid of it as it would require a rewrite.

I would say that I doubt new projects are starting with jQuery but I know there are devs out there that know the jQuery way better than the vanilla javascript way to get things done.

MBCook• 2 years ago

But if you don’t want to get rid of it for business reasons, which I get, a major upgrade that changes a bunch of APIs and drops features would still require a lot of work.

And if you’re forced to leave 3.x over security or something (may happen in the future) then why not just move off then?

lawgimenez• 2 years ago

Based on last year’s Stack survey, JQuery is the third popular.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...

dylan6045• 2 years ago

Because I'm old and new tricks are less interesting, I find $.ajax() much more simple than promise, await, async of native JS.

I have used straight native JS on a couple of smaller personal projects just to get some familiarity with it. However, it's just muscle memory type of getting stuff done with $.ajax() for me.

Also, maybe 20 people use any of the code I write for manipulating DOM. I'm not a UI person. I'm a back end person that has to write front end stuff because nobody else does it.

lakpan3• 2 years ago

It’s only simpler because you know how to use it. For most use cases fetch and async/await is just easier.

duskwuff2• 2 years ago

I find $.ajax() much more simple than promise, await, async of native JS.

$.ajax() returns a promise. If you're calling .done() / .error() on it to handle the results -- well, that's exactly how you work with promises.

austin-cheney6• 2 years ago

WebSockets are easier and faster.

sublinear• 2 years ago

There are plenty of legacy web projects still using jQuery that nobody has been able to replace.

Off the top of my head I'm thinking of complex boring stuff like WCAG-compliant carousels or whatever. The kind of libraries people tend to reach for because marketing wanted them, but are otherwise ignored.

ahmedfromtunis• 2 years ago

Django uses jQuery for its admin interface. (That is, jQuery is used by the Django maintainers to write the built-in admin interface.)

But I also know that a lot of the "low-cost" agencies are still using it. Probably because de the devs are used to using and don't want to bother to (re)learn things.

At least in my country, a lot of website are still using it (and very old, outdated versions at that).

arp2423• 2 years ago

The DOM API now solves a lot of the issues jQuery solved 15 years ago, but often in very different ways. I don't think it's better; a lot of the APIs are awkwardly designed IMO. The big upshot is that it's built-in, but that's it, and with a very small jQuery library you get a nicer API. Sometimes the extra dependency is best avoided, but often it doesn't matter.

So, whenever reasonable, I prefer to just add jQuery. Maybe there's something better, but the differences/improvements of what I've seen doesn't seem that great and jQuery works, so that's the point? I guess the younger kids never used it, but it's easy enough to pick up if you know standard JS.

sam0x172• 2 years ago

It's funny, I just spent a bunch of time removing the last vestiges of react for a company, replacing it with HTMX, which imo is the spiritual successor to jQuery in some ways

mhitza• 2 years ago

I wouldn't exclude the possibility of new developers that found some stackoverflow answer, or another, which suggests jQuery as the solution.

miragecraft• 2 years ago

jQuery is still excellent if you are creating websites (not web apps) with minimal JavaScript.

mrieck• 2 years ago

Solo or small team devs who hate modern tooling. Good example is levelsio guy: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1750175827197567165

I'm also in that camp and still use jQuery.

My current SaaS is an extension that doesn't have much UI code https://www.snipcss.com, and my next SaaS will be a chatgpt powered web automation extension that has a good amount of UI. Both use jQuery.

Edit: I didn't say why I don't just use vanilla with querySelectorAll - majn reasons are I like how I can attach events (attaching to parent while targeting dynamically added subelements), chaining functions, and it's just less code than vanilla

gexla• 2 years ago

I'm guessing most active development which people are actually consuming. Already mentioned is Wordpress, which is most of the web. There's probably tons of front-ends using old Bootstrap which also came with Jquery.

Greenfield projects might not be using Jquery, but is anyone actually using those? ;)

AdrianB1• 2 years ago

I am using it when I need AJAX + Datatables for quick, but not dirty pages showing data in different ways that takes minutes to set up. Actually my projects are native JS for most and jQuery for that specific combination above. These are not public or commercial apps, just internal use for my department. I am not even a developer by role, but I build stuff when needed and time allows it.

OccamsMirror• 2 years ago

With browsers having much better support with DOM selection, why would anyone be using jQuery in 2024? Not trying to throw shade, I actually think it's cool that it's still being worked on. But I'm confused as to what the use case is.

anamexis• 2 years ago

If I had to guess, a convenient API and a massive ecosystem.

arp2423• 2 years ago

There's a bunch of pretty convenient selectors that are not supported by document.querySelector(), such as :selected, :checked and a bunch of others (I forgot which exactly, but I've run in to it a few times).

In general the DOM API offends pretty much every single of my sensibilities on how to design good APIs. I also have some gripes with the jQuery API, but it's a lot better. jQuery just reads and writes so much more fluently.

evan_• 2 years ago

`:visible` and `:hidden` are really cool

mkl2• 2 years ago

:checked is standard CSS, and old.

niutech4• 2 years ago

:contains(text) is useful.

sibit• 2 years ago

Legacy projects? I maintain an old .NET web app that's ~15 years old and runs on jQuery. While the dream of refactoring or rewriting the entire thing using something more modern (like Web Components) is nice we're never gonna do it.

Semaphor• 2 years ago

Slightly older WebForms (I know) project. New stuff gets done in vanilla or Vue, but there’s a lot of jQuery there that certainly will not be replaced without great reason.

rubymancer• 2 years ago

I love it for admin pages.

If only 20 internals are ever going to see it, jquery is as light as can be, can be loaded right from a CDN, needs no kind of transpilation and handles basically all you need.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

admin pages
CDN

There’s a sysadmin just got called in for a security incident. Best to include it as a vendor library.

jszymborski• 2 years ago

Bring yayQuery back. The people demand it.

technojunkie2• 2 years ago

For those of you who are curious what drives jQuery in 2024 and beyond, you need to remember that WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web, and the majority of installations and so many plugins critically rely on jQuery. Yes, seriously.

Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great. jQuery will probably be around dominantly on the web for years to come.

ecshafer• 2 years ago

Also, jQuery is awesome.

People have been in love with the overly complex and fancy javascript frameworks for the last 15 years or so. But jQuery doing dynamic binding to dynamically generated forms for some error states and maybe an ajax calls is literally all the javascript you need in 99% of web pages and the rest is overkill.

The industry is going to move away from the complexities to React and towards more of this simplicity with htmx, phoenix live view, ruby on rails turbo, and yes just jQuery.

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

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.

tipiirai3• 2 years ago

Second to that: jQuery is awesome.

Or more specifically: the idea that websites can be built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and _optional_ JS. jQuery embraces progressive enhancement and separation of concerns pattern, which is quite the opposite of how websites are built these days. Web development starts with 10+ React import statements for components, CSS, images, and whatnot. JavaScript is a must, not optional.

rdedev• 2 years ago

I'm not a web developer but sometimes I have to make a page with some JS functionality. jQuery saves me a lot of time in such cases

esaym• 2 years ago

But jQuery doing dynamic binding to dynamically generated forms

Do you have an example of that?

erhaetherth4• 2 years ago

If you don't want to use a big framework, then you needn't use any library at all. Nearly everything in jQuery is 1 line of modern JS, no?

krick2• 2 years ago

I won't dare to predict where industry "is going to move", since I'm not really a frontend developer, so what do I know anyway (and especially since it seems to switch directions every couple of years, and mostly being pulled in all directions simultaneously). But personally I still prefer to use stand-alone JS-scripts and libs included directly into the page, if I can. Mostly because I hate having to deal with complicated (and, importantly, rather slow) build process just for the sake of a couple of web-pages, when the real stuff is some totally invisible backend processing or maybe some sort of HTTP API to be used by other services.

Also, honestly, I really just don't know what's the "correct" way to do things in 2024 on frontend, and I don't know where to even look for a guide, if I don't really want to spend next 6 months entirely in the pursuit of attaining "real" frontend-dev proficiency, but ultimately just to make working stuff, even if it doesn't quite follow the v2024 web-etiquette.

webworker• 2 years ago

I keep saying this. At some point, some very smart people are going to figure out how expensive React is to build and maintain, and it’s going to change the conversation.

falsandtru2• 2 years ago

jQuery remains the best JSONP library. It can get data even when other libraries are blocked.

patrickaljord• 2 years ago

jQuery is amazing, still remember the joy of using it 20 years ago. That being said, React, Vue and similar are just better IMO to build and maintain complex apps. Don't get me wrong, jQuery was the best thing at its time and I will always be grateful to its contributors, but today there are better alternatives. I think htmx is nice but not seeing it taking over other frameworks.

yashg• 2 years ago

Yup, jQuery is indeed awesome!

holoduke4• 2 years ago

You still need some kind of application framework. Jquery is just a low level utility. But higher level you need to maintain architecture. Specially in spa's

khasan222• 2 years ago

I’ve been writing JavaScript for 15 years professionally, and I must say this comment seems to be made by someone not as familiar with the context here. Moving away from React and frameworks like it would require a radical rethinking of what we expect to do with web apps. Building something like google maps, google docs, figma, are definitely doable with some of these tools, but it is almost impossible to maintain. This comment truly ignore the context of why frameworks like react took off. Jquery is great if you need a slideshow on a page, and maybe just some tracking, and even then, I’ve recently opted to just use vanilla js, with things like webpack build targeting whatever versions I would need. JavaScript programming is complex because making great ux can be a non trivial task.

Please excuse any typos, written on the phone

lucsky2• 2 years ago

No, the "industry" is not going to move away from React (or Vue or Solid or Svelte), but idiots on HackerNews (and Reddit and Twitter and Mastodon, etc) might finally stop conflating web SITES and web APPS. One can dream.

dagss• 2 years ago

Unpoly too (very similar to htmx but the small difference makes it a lot more convenient I feel, I wonder why Unpoly isn't getting as much traction as htmx)

docmars4• 2 years ago

Organizing a large jQuery project is absolute hell though. I'll take modern frameworks like Vue any day. The ease of shipping a full-fledged app that feels easy to create and maintain began with Vue (and Svelte).

React tries to achieve the same result, but if you don't use it perfectly right, you're in for hours and hours of headaches and non-solutions.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Fully agree, jQuery + Bootstrap + standard Web + SSR, and we're gold.

silent_cal2• 2 years ago

I read that the JS fetch API makes jQuery obsolete, is that not true?

Onavo• 2 years ago

They just need to add JSX support. Half the reason people use react is because of JSX.

IgorPartola• 2 years ago

Maybe unpopular opinion but JSX is inferior to something like the Vue templating system. I much prefer to have HTML with some JS sprinkled in than JS that looks like HTML but isn’t.

kijin• 2 years ago

I think you can already do that by wiring together something like NakedJSX. You just need a fancy jQuery plugin to make it more ergonomic.

technojunkie2• 2 years ago

If "they" is WordPress, have you tried modern PHP? 8.x has come a long way to looking and feeling like a modern programming language. So many new things reminding me of Typescript, Javascript, Python, etc.

quickthrower23• 2 years ago

Should be easy. It is just a case of presenting the right interface to the generated code. For example Mithril supports it (with some quirks admittedly). But in simple terms it is an adaptor.

rpncreator• 2 years ago

A variant of this was tried over a decade ago, but never made it live - jQuery Templates. Not quite the same…

https://github.com/BorisMoore/jquery-tmpl

boredtofears2• 2 years ago

Fully agreed. I built a mostly vanilla JS app using a bare bones JSX lib[1] a few months ago and was surprised at how little I missed the rest of React.

[1] https://github.com/alex-kinokon/jsx-dom

thedangler• 2 years ago

I remember switching from mootools to jQuery back in 2006ish. Thought it was fantastic. Awesome it’s still around. We still use it from Time to time.

kentf• 2 years ago

Don't forget Prototype (http://prototypejs.org/)

quickthrower23• 2 years ago

The fact that it, well, works doesn’t help with the React world domination either.

prisenco• 2 years ago

Wordpress devs are the plumbers of the tech industry. It’s not glamorous work but there’s a ton of money in it because so many people need them.

If I ever decide to retire from latest and greatest hype cycle big tech startup world, I’ll go build Wordpress sites for honest coin and wrap up every day by 3pm.

TheMajor3• 2 years ago

The fact that Wordpress runs so much of the web sometimes wakes me in a cold sweat. If you're a dev worth their salt and knows proven engineering and design patterns, then Wordpress code is absolutely terrifying to look through.

radium3d• 2 years ago

heh, try 11-12pm. o.O

irjustin• 2 years ago

jQuery will always hold a special place in my heart. It made absolutely terrible APIs usable and help abstract away a lot of the different browser issues.

While I do a lot of effort to stay off jQuery these days, every time I have a library that ends up using jQuery its always intuitive to use.

krick2• 2 years ago

Honestly, though, given more sophisticated browser-native selectors were implemented way after jQuery was, I wonder why didn't they just make at least somewhat jQuery-compatible API. It's just way simpler.

thr0waway001• 2 years ago

I don't care what anyone says, jQuery still rocks and is so damn important and influential. You remove jQuery from every piece of software a good chunk of the all the websites stop working all around the Internet.

TheMajor3• 2 years ago

Yup, hard truths: vanilla JS is far less readable and clunkier than just using jQuery to do the same thing. Also, not everyone needs or wants to move to a shadow DOM framework with a zillion components and high complexity. If you're building a SPA or PWA, yes, absolutely, but for the vast majority of us who use a traditional backend/CMS-driven site with server-side rendering where client-side interactivity is needed, jQuery still does the job really nicely.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

I'm not saying jQuery isn't great, but being entrenched and being great are two different things. It's not really saying anything to say things would break if you remove it.

The thing is for a certain time, jQuery was almost seen as inseparable from JS itself. Like the Python standard library is to Python. You can still find StackOverflow questions today asking to do something in JS and the answer is jQuery, and not just "here's how to do it in jQuery", just "here's what you asked for". That means it certainly got used in a lot of places where it wasn't really necessary.

The backlash against it, though, is just your typical pendulum swing that seems so much an unfortunate part of human nature. It's like when CSS was in and table-based layouts were out. I saw developers trying to use CSS to render tables. Nuance is hard and people can't help going to extremes. jQuery is probably still a really useful tool. I've seen some jQuery expressions that are far more elegant and beautiful then a plain JS equivalent. Whether this matters for any particular project is completely up to you. I don't like the way it encourages tons of ad hoc JS snippets all over the place, but that's a fault of developers, not jQuery.

tambourine_man2• 2 years ago

…WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web…

Why still? WordPress, like jQuery, is awesome. It's an incredibly powerful and easy open source CMS. I hope it takes more of the Web.

And if you're gonna defend the decentralization of the Web (and I do), it's hard to find a better argument than “just buy a domain and install WordPress”.

PrimeMcFly6• 2 years ago

It's a buggy insecure mess. No one should be advocating for wordpress.

lostemptations5• 2 years ago

jQuery is just way cooler than the comparatively build in (and sometimes obtuse) web standard replacements for it.

todotask• 2 years ago

Now we have React, React DOM and jQuery in WordPress.

noduerme2• 2 years ago

I was going to post on HN not long ago and didn't, about how I still can't find a great event chain handling / bubbling model that lets me use both DOM members and abstract class instances to trigger interchangeable events. I've built my own event dispatchers here and there, but jQuery just does everything right. Although event handling is almost the only thing I still use jQuery for, it's so useful that I still include it in almost every client-side project. The reason I was going to post was to ask if anyone knew of a slim library that could both $(window).trigger('click') and $(myClassInstance).trigger('myCustomEvent',{data}) with the same API for listening to either one asynchronously. With the rise of fetch() and css selectors I could probably do without the rest of jQuery at this point. But why reinvent the wheel? And before anyone tells me that having class instances dispatch events is a code smell... it's absolutely necessary if you want to build responsive frameworks from scratch.

[Just for example, my base component class listens for a particular custom resize event dispatched from the screen that contains it, which only dispatches to components on screens that don't scroll and need to reformat their contents. The screen class listens for window.resize but only dispatches if it's in trouble with the layout. Putting individual DOM resize listeners to window on each and every component would be insane.]

claytongulick2• 2 years ago

If your class instances are attached to the DOM somehow, you may be looking for CustomEvents?

    document.querySelector('#something').dispatchEvent(
      new CustomEvent('myCustomEvent', {...options})
    );

and

    document.querySelector('#something-else').addEventListener('myCustomEvent', () => {...});

You don't even need CustomEvents if you don't need to carry extra data with the event. You can just do

    new Event('myCustomEvent')

and dispatch it.

For triggering 'click' events and such, you can create and dispatch native events, as described here [1].

More verbose than jquery, like most native DOM APIs, but works well.

If you're not dealing with a DOM element and just need to dispatch/listen from a class, try out EventTarget [2]?

Your class can inherit from EventTarget, and it gets dispatchEvent and addEventListener, just like a DOM element and you can use any of the above things with it:

    class Test extends EventTarget {
    ...
    }

    let foo = new Test();
    foo.dispatchEvent(...);

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/Creating...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventTarget

profmonocle• 2 years ago

It's not just WordPress. A company I used to work for has tens of thousands of lines of jQuery code powering their enterprise SAAS product.

A rewrite in a modern JS framework is just not going to happen unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Much of this code is extremely client-specific stuff written over a decade ago. The argument that using a modern framework helps recruiting doesn't work - the company only pays $75-90k for frontend engineers and has very low turnover, most current engineers have been there 5+ years. And most importantly, their current stack works just fine; they have a bunch of long-time clients who are happy.

A good chunk of software engineering happens in "boring" businesses like this in cities with a much lower cost-of-living than the big tech industry hubs like the Bay Area / Seattle / etc.

sanitycheck• 2 years ago

The other problem with a "rewrite in a modern JS framework" is that when it's finally done it'll only be a few more years until it needs another "rewrite in a modern JS framework". And that's worse, because at least with JQuery it just stays the same whereas with anything in the NPM ecosystem using anything older than, say, 6 months is kind of a nightmare in terms of dependencies and tooling.

Not broke? Don't fix!

mardifoufs2• 2 years ago

1/3 of the web does not mean much. Are you referring to web usage or just the number of web pages?

seydor3• 2 years ago

web pages and it does matter a lot. Among others, Woocommerce runs 23.43% of e-commerce.

mouzogu4• 2 years ago

Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great.

if something is used, it has value. it's not deprecated.

seydor3• 2 years ago

A lot of us are using it actively. It's so lightweight now that it s free, and it s somewhat better than vanilla js.

kamaal• 2 years ago

And many many company internal tools, that won't be rewritten and just get replaced with something better(ReactJS?) over time.

It would be around for long is nice, but you can't make a career using it these days.

jquery, perl just some of those insanely useful tools which get the work done, but they don't pay you well these days.

synergy20• 2 years ago

Most elegant API for Javascript, can it become part of Javascript API directly one day?

didip• 2 years ago

Great job jQuery folks! I will forever love jQuery. It simply gets the job done.

mouzogu4• 2 years ago

Bootstrap, PHP, JQuery & WP. The stack for people who get shit done.

ActualHacker• 2 years ago

I was evaluating a SaaS solution just yesterday, and in one of their examples on Github they used jQuery as the primary frontend for the project, with extensive usage.

I passed on the company

jraph2• 2 years ago

Why? What's wrong, if it works well?

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

There are things that work better.

kmoser• 2 years ago

With SaaS, the front end might be the least important piece of the application.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Too bad for you. I'm glad for them they don't have to deal with you as a customer.

nfriedly• 2 years ago

I remember building web apps in the days before jQuery, it was a mess. The DOM APIs were full of quirks, and all the libraries that predated jQuery had their own issues.

These days, we have better options for building complex web apps, including much-improved native APIs. I don't think I've started a new project using jQuery in 10 years. But for maintainin a lightweight website that just needs a little bit of interaction or pizzazz, I still think jQuery is perfectly fine.

yread• 2 years ago

Especially the events! Those were browser-specific nightmares

senfiaj2• 2 years ago

Today it's not nearly as bad as it was before. I personally have very few reasons to use jQuery. Maybe it's somewhat shorter code and supports some cool pseudoselectors (IMHO, they are often bad patterns) but for me it's often easier to understand and debug a code using vanilla JS. For example, sometimes I have struggled to find the exact event listener callback by using dev tools because when you use nested click events because the code passes throw a lot of jQuery code before reaching the actual event listener.

andirk2• 2 years ago

I like Vue's reactive nature the best (specifically `v-if`, `v-for`), but jQuery was the one that got me over the hump before I actually knew Javascript.

And I encourage most projects that use a lot of jQuery to consider using jQuery's CDN version as there is like a 50%+ chance the person already has it cached on their system.

notzane• 2 years ago

Doesn’t work anymore :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894135

andirk2• 2 years ago

Wow! I'm embarrassed I didn't know this since 2020. Too bad we can't allow certain super popular libraries of whose project maintainers we trust to still be cached across domains.

nsp• 2 years ago

This hasn't been the case for about four years. Since you can use cache status to track people, resources are now cached per hostname requesting as well.

https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-ca...

lenkite• 2 years ago

This feels like it is still pretty good when you are on a common host like github pages.

mholt• 2 years ago

I loved jQuery. Still great, but browser APIs have improved.

Now I mainly use AJQuery: https://github.com/coolaj86/ajquery.js/blob/main/ajquery.js

wkirby2• 2 years ago

I'm consistently surprised by the commenters on HN who seem to think jQuery is just a DOM selection library, when in fact it is a widely supported, incredibly stable tool set for (yes) DOM selection, but also attribute manipulation, Ajax requests, event handling, animation, and general utility functions. What's more, where there _is_ native functionality that replaces jQuery, the API is never as fluent.

For work that needs a little enhancement on top of server-side HTML, but not a full-blown JS UI framework, jQuery is a small price to pay for a stable, reliable, and cross-browser compatible dependency.

genocidicbunny3• 2 years ago

I don't think it's that surprising given the demographics of HN posters that I've observed. Many will immediately reach for the big JS framework du jour when they need anything more than a little DOM selection stuff, because that's what they've always done.

erhaetherth4• 2 years ago

There's 2 types of web pages. Websites and web apps. If you're building a web app, you're going to want a framework that isn't going to fall apart the second things start getting complicated. If you're making a little marketing website, sure, sprinkle some jQuery on there and call it a day. Probably better for performance and SEO unless you want to spend 10x as long micro-optimizing your SSR. Point is, there's different use-cases.

DrSiemer4• 2 years ago

A few years ago I dropped jQuery for plain vanilla js and I've never looked back. Native js has everything jQuery has, except for the pile of often poorly maintained half baked "plugins", that usually only do what they want to do and not much else.

Yes, the vanilla selectors are more verbose, but any half decent code editor will make them just as fast to type. I don't mean to be penantic, but I don't really understand why so many people still use jQuery at all.

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

gonational• 2 years ago

LMFAO every example of "modern" looks like a course in how not to design an API, etc. The jQuery examples are so clean and expressive. Imagine landing on a page like that and thinking, "hey, that 'modern' option looks good." You'll end up with 28KB (jQuery gzipped size) of just extra syntax before you're done with your app, not to mention the additional 160 hours of work.

You'll likely be adding 6-700KB of React and its ilk anyway (I see it in every project now).

QuadrupleA• 2 years ago

Look at your own link - the "modern" way of doing it is always about 2-3x as verbose as jQuery. Editors let you type that mess faster, but you'll still have to read through it, maintain it, scroll it into view in your editor, see less of it onscreen at a time, etc. I'll take a clean, succinct API over a noisy verbose cumbersome one any day.

And what are we saving by eschewing it and going vanilla? One little 30kb-gzipped javascript file - smaller than most jpegs. I agree for super simple tasks it might be best to skip it.

The DOM API is a sloppy and hastily-designed pile of crap from the OOP era that we're unfortunately stuck with for legacy reasons. jQuery shows what it could have been.

squeaky-clean• 2 years ago

Some of those examples aren't really equivalent. If you use that vanilla js way to show/hide, it won't restore the display property to the value it was before using hiding. It will just shift it between display: "none" and display: "". If you need something to be a display: "inline-block", the vanilla js example will lose that and break your styling.

You can modify the code to set the display property as inline-block, but now you need a different show function for every possible display value you want to restore. Or you need to build a layer of state to remember what the original value was and hey you've rewritten the jquery version.

And this is all ignoring that the jquery versions just look so much simpler to remember and are cleaner to read.

skydhash2• 2 years ago

Native js has everything jQuery has, except for the pile of often poorly maintained half baked "plugins"

The great things about these plugins is that you can strip them down to what you need and patch them yourself (remember lib or vendor directory). NPM and build tools make this a chore.

pseudosavant• 2 years ago

"I don't really understand why so many people still use jQuery at all."

Because it has a beautifully designed API. I don't directly use jQuery usually anymore. But I use the API in a basic DOM wrapper I've written. https://gist.github.com/pseudosavant/b86eedd9960ade958d49447...

Sohcahtoa822• 2 years ago

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

I'm convinced this site is actually satire and it designed to promote jQuery. In nearly every example, the native version is far more verbose.

cocochanel• 2 years ago

your link actually convinced me that jQuery is a much better alternative to vanilla js.

jazzcrab• 2 years ago

commenters on HN who seem to think jQuery is just a DOM selection library

proceeds to name selection and native functions

wkirby2• 2 years ago

just

mouzogu4• 2 years ago

yes and far easier to drop jq into a project.

no need for build tools and all headache. (i know you do that with react but its not comparable features).

robertoandred2• 2 years ago

You don’t run your JS through babel or minification?

voat• 2 years ago

Another day another JavaScript framework! I'm so tired of all this churn in frontend. /s

DonnyV• 2 years ago

A lot of what jQuery was created to do is now baked into the browser. CSS selectors, proper ajax, animation, etc.

I built a small convenience library around fetch to make it super easy to use ajax like in jQuery. Also built a small utility library around ES6 methods that recreate jQuery methods. It doesn't take much to get back the convenience of jQuery but still use all the new tools.

I love jQuery and used it for years. But there are better tools now.

hallman76• 2 years ago

Just in case folks aren't familiar, this site breaks down jQuery features into web standard code: https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

mm007emko2• 2 years ago

I remember jQuery from it's heyday when we used it as a replacement for Mootools. Since many people are going from React to HTMX, maybe we've made a full circle and we'll see web using just plain jQuery as well?

evilduck• 2 years ago

I came up in a similar era, I don’t think back fondly on those messes. Doing a modern app with accessibility, mobile support, real time updates, visualizations, and maybe a few PWA features with just jQuery sounds incredibly unpleasant.

I’m waiting for the HTMX hype train to meet reality too. Programming your app in pseudo attributes with a DSL is going to wear thin quickly.

mm007emko2• 2 years ago

I think that many websites even nowadays don't need all that jazz and many would improve if less JavaScript was on them. How many times have you loaded a website only to watch a couple of JavaScript "spinners" for everything to load only to click somewhere and everything started again? MS Azure management is one of such sites.

SPA with real time updates, complex layouts to be mobile-friendly, real-time updates of many components, endless scrolling and PWA features would be a total PITA. Yes, I don't disagree.

The vast majority of web apps I have seen so far don't need to be like that.

agos4• 2 years ago

"many" might be a stretch

arkh• 2 years ago

HTMX makes me think of Mootools: small, very specialized js library.

niutech4• 2 years ago

HTMX is like $().load()

shakabrah• 2 years ago

I learned jQuery before i learned javascript proper over a decade ago. I didn’t even really understand what i was doing was considered programming. although i’ve not touched jquery in many years, i now have a great livelihood doing something i love. Long may they live.

drakenot• 2 years ago

I remember when jQuery was first released. To convince my coworkers to use it, I held an internal presentation called "Don't Fear the $," where I walked through the advantages it provided.

donohoe2• 2 years ago

In job postings for FE developers, I usually put in this line:

“A healthy disdain for jQuery”

This changes nothing.

hu35• 2 years ago

The filter works both ways.

When I see too much emotion in engineering job posts I take it as a sign that the team is more likely to be cult driven and less likely to reasonably discuss tools in terms of trade-offs.

donohoe2• 2 years ago

Fair. In reality it usually leads to some good questions on the nature of frameworks.

tcper• 2 years ago

A job pays you 10k a week for writing jQuery code, will you refuse it?

agos4• 2 years ago

we all know that job does not exist

ent1012• 2 years ago

I wrote puter.com using jQuery :P

Beefin• 2 years ago

this is a pretty amazing site

ent1012• 2 years ago

Thank you! Glad you liked it :)

LorenzoGood• 2 years ago

I feel like most of Jquery has been re implemented as browser api's anyway.

joshka• 2 years ago

Is jQuery the COBOL of the 2000s?

MythTrashcan• 2 years ago

If most of the web didn't have a huge jQuery dependancy, we would have mostly moved on years ago.

seattle_spring• 2 years ago

I thought so too before reading these comments. I'm surprised how much people think jQuery still provides everything you need for a modern webapp. I have to step back and realize that my world has been working on millions+ LOC apps with hundreds of simultaneously committing devs, vs a lot of jQuery devs committing to personal-sized projects or blog-like web pages. Totally different solutions for different problems. I'd still pick vanilla es6+ vs jQuery for smaller stuff, but I get why some might not.

tored2• 2 years ago

Worst part of jQuery is actually upgrading it to a new version, because the api design that made jQuery powerful is also what makes it quite difficult figure out if you broke anything.

mkoryak2• 2 years ago

Why worry when you can easily load both versions with jQuery.noConflict() !!!

Or you can just load one on top of the other. It will be ok

tored2• 2 years ago

Loading jQuery twice is a band aid solution.

However the jQuery 4 announcement page linked to this jQuery migration plugin that I was unaware of. Perhaps it can help in some old projects.

https://github.com/jquery/jquery-migrate

etoxin• 2 years ago

jQuery has mostly been replaced by new browser apis. It was a great library that brought the web forward. It will still be around the web for decades to come. If you're updating to jQuery 4. Why not try switching to native js.

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

MangoCoffee• 2 years ago

Jquery made it to version 4 beta and there's a version 5 in the future. it looks like there's a big enough market for JQuery.

holoduke4• 2 years ago

I still use it as my low level html operations lib in my framework. Its still super handy. And size wise small.

sazz• 2 years ago

Oh I loved jQuery.

Anybody remembers DataTables https://datatables.net or X-editable https://vitalets.github.io/x-editable/ ?

werdnapk• 2 years ago

Remember? I still use DataTables.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

Many third-party themes still package it. I've looked at alternatives, and they're either less function with way more config, or they are trying to be Excel clones.

mysteryos• 2 years ago

This throws me back to my junior days (2008~) where i had a heated discussion with my technical lead, to add jQuery to a project.

His argument was that the size of minified library(40kb) would add too much overhead to the loading time of the page.

He then, promptly spent a full week trying to code an ajax call and testing its support on different browsers and ultimately failed to make it work on Internet explorer 5.

jQuery solves many headaches back then, and yes he finally added the library to the project.

freediver• 2 years ago

Kudos to your technical lead for fighting a good fight.

sam0x172• 2 years ago

Yeah people forget this a lot, browsers used to largely disagree with each other, and jQuery was the only sensible glue that could hold a codebase together in that regard

geenat• 2 years ago

Awesome. My problem is I've been waiting for 4.0 soooo long I ended up making my own jQuery with some key differences:

  * Animations, tweens, timelines use pure CSS, instead of jQuery's custom system.
  * Use one element or lists transparently.
  * Inline <script> Locality of Behavior. No more inventing unique "one time" names.
  * Vanilla first. Zero dependencies. 1 file. Under 340 lines.

https://github.com/gnat/surreal

That said, it's fantastic to see 4.0 here, and I'll certainly be upgrading my many sites that use it!

panphora2• 2 years ago

I've always thought there should be a modern, lightweight jQuery alternative like this. Well done! I love the syntax and have been implementing something similar (although with inline events and more than just the standard array methods). [0]

Do you have an article/screencast on how the locality of behavior is implemented in both surreal and its companion project css-scope-inline? I'd love to understand it so I can maintain it longterm and add it to my own projects.

I'd love to talk with you about your philosophy of the web. I think we could sync up about some things!

[0] https://hyperspace.so/All.js.png

niutech4• 2 years ago

I've always thought there should be a modern, lightweight jQuery alternative like this.

Have you heard of Zepto? https://zeptojs.com

ape42• 2 years ago

For the functions that are being removed, is there a list of the native replacements. eg $.isNumeric() == parseFloat() ?

StayTrue• 2 years ago

A guide would be nice but you can always look at the jQuery implementations. isNumeric:

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/bf48c21d225c31f0f9b544...

ape42• 2 years ago

Thanks. That seems useful to keep in jQuery even though its only one line of code. So everyone doesn't have to copy and paste that non-obvious function.

lofaszvanitt• 2 years ago

Time to send letters to the core js standards team to ask JR for permission (plus giving him a briefcase and a deus ex machina ;)) to bring the full jQuery treatment into core JS. In order to replace the cumbersome JS things with jQuery. Why always complicate things...

timeon2• 2 years ago

I still think that MooTools was better.

kinj28• 2 years ago

FWIW we built our entire low code platform drag and drop editor with jquery. This includes editor, all controls (read Ui components) and needlessly to say that even the code that it ends up generating is pure play jquery. But the execs at big corps often question our sales engineering for why not react/angular/ etc.

So I am super glad to read that jquery continues to be so relevant even now. And am glad my cofounder and CTO always continued to back this rather than looked at moving the stack.

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

Nothing to add. Just happy to see jQuery is still around. It's easy to forgot how widely used (depended on, rather?) it still is.

neycoda• 2 years ago

I'll still take jQuery over raw JavaScript. Much easier, more efficient, more intuitive.

wsaryoo• 2 years ago

Always depressed when I saw some new JS library promote

"No jQuery" is one of its main features

jQuery v4.0 Beta

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