
JQuery 3.4.0 Released - mkurz
http://blog.jquery.com/2019/04/10/jquery-3-4-0-released/
======
peteforde
Every time I use jQuery after helping my friends battle Reactive monsters, I
am so eternally grateful that I have such a productive and satisfying tool at
my disposal. It requires zero bike-shedding and almost every imaginable edge-
case is solved before I start. If it ends up sucking, it's because I made it
suck.

Just to abuse metaphors, I believe that jQuery is a "bicycle for the mind" in
the true Steve Jobs sense. If you don't love it, please knock yourself out or
try an edgier SPA. Spend all of your free time learning how Hooks just made
everything you were excited about obsolete.

The pool is warm and the weather is lovely, friends.

~~~
KajMagnus
I migrated from jQuery to React, never going back and I wouldn't use jQuery
for a new project.

I agree that jQuery is ok for simple things, however I'd probably prefer
something more light weight, like Bliss.js instead. jQuery's 30kb bundle size
does make pages load slightly slightly slower on mobile phones, in comparison
to Bliss (about 3kb last time I checked).

~~~
EB66
jQuery and SPAs don't have to be mutually exclusive.

At my work, we've been building SPAs with jQuery long before Angular or React
even existed. More recently, we've built our own JavaScript SPA framework
whose components can be written with vanilla JS or jQuery. Most of us prefer
to use jQuery for our components because the syntax is often more expressive
and concise than vanilla JS.

We recently open sourced the framework:
[http://github.com/elliotnb/nimbly](http://github.com/elliotnb/nimbly)

~~~
mtzaldo
I mixed jquery + redux. I only use those 2 libs:
[https://github.com/mtzaldo/jqueryredux](https://github.com/mtzaldo/jqueryredux)

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DanielBMarkham
I keep walking into shops and look at a god-awful mess on the screen, with
complex builds, state, unit-tests, and all kinds of other stuff that come
together to create an app. Then I look at these same apps and realize that
there's something like a 20-to-1 ratio between all of that and the simplest
possible solution, which many times (but not all) involves JQuery.

Hey, if whatever works for you is awesome, please carry on. But if you're
behind schedule, the SPA is too slow, the users say it's buggy, most of your
devs couldn't manipulate the DOM directly if they were forced to, and the lead
just spent until midnight getting the build working right, then you might want
to start examining some of your development and architecture choices.

I love tools and abstraction frameworks -- right until the time they start
taking over more time, effort, and learning than just pounding a solution out
in something like JQuery would.

I'm glad the update is out. Looking forward to playing around with it some ...
the next time I need something as full-featured as it is. With greenfield
development, we start with zero stuff and carefully justify each addition
after that.

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BilalBudhani
I still write applications where I don't need modern frameworks like Vue/React
at all. These apps follow traditional framework generating HTML, it makes so
much sense to just add jQuery to enhance the user experience by sprinkling JS
snippets.

I believe there is a use case of every technology. There are use cases where
React/Vue makes sense, similarly, there are still use cases where jQuery can
be useful.

~~~
onion2k
_I still write applications where I don 't need modern frameworks like
Vue/React at all._

jQuery is not an alternative to React or Vue. It's an alternative to vanilla
JS.

When you're writing something that doesn't obviously need everything a
reactive app framework like React offers the question you need to be asking
isn't "Do I need React or do I only need jQuery?", it's simply "Do I need
jQuery?". These days, unless you need to support very old browsers, most of
the time the jQuery code isn't _that_ much simpler than writing plain old JS.

~~~
neokantian
JQuery is an alternative to React or Vue. JQuery is philosophically another
approach to solving the same problem. JQuery offers you functions to call
without telling you how to write your program. JQuery is a philosophy about
respect, and about not knowing better, because you actually know that you
don't.

~~~
petepete
As is plain old JavaScript.

React and Vue are geared towards solving a specific part of that problem.

Without a very good reason, most developers shouldn't be trying to solve the
problems Vue and React solve in jQuery/JS. Of course, some will want to and
nothing's stopping them, but I wouldn't recommend it for _normal_ projects.

~~~
onion2k
_Without a very good reason, most developers shouldn 't be trying to solve the
problems Vue and React solve in jQuery/JS._

That's a much clearer way of explaining the point I was trying to make.

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steve_adams_86
I feel like so many people lamenting jQuery might be remembering the pain and
frustration of dealing with the monstrosities people built with the library
rather than the library itself.

As libraries go I think jQuery's one of the nicer ones I've used. I don't use
it now, but it's pretty good software in my books and I'm glad it was there
when I needed it.

~~~
mekkkkkk
This is so true. jQuery is really a fantastic library, but it gets dragged in
the mud because of the applications of it. What people forget is that the
adoption of SPA's preceded the widespread use of modern SPA-centric frameworks
that we use today (duh). jQuery was the defacto standard library for web
development before this transition, and naturally devs crowbarred together SPA
behemoths using it. It turns out that it was not the ideal tool for that job,
but it WAS (and still is) the perfect tool for the kind of lightweight
interactivity that it was originally designed for.

Sorry for repeating your point in so many words, but the hate towards jQuery
really gets me down.

~~~
code_duck
The hate for jQuery has to be from people who never used Prototype and
Mootools, and think that React and Vue have existed since the beginning of
time. jQuery was very useful back in those days, and pretty much everyone but
David Mark agreed.

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localhostdotdev
just a simple reminder:

    
    
        Top 1m 77.15%
        Top 100k 87.37%
        Top 10k 88.83%
    

[https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery](https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery)

~~~
ehsankia
Interestingly enough, if you uncheck Top 1m and look at either 100k or 10k,
you can see the start of the drop since 2017.

~~~
vanderZwan
I wonder if the lack of updates affects that. No new exposure or new things to
get excited about.

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_the_inflator
There is so much we can be grateful for jQuery. It was the first JS platform
(plugins) and had a huge impact on the DOM API. Without jQuery there would not
be any BackboneJS, AngularJS etc.

jQuery got its niche today. Still the best for simple one-off landingpages.

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jesusthatsgreat
I prefer jQuery syntax than javascript. It's the only thing I miss about
jQuery.

I also think there's a lot of people still using jQuery simply because they're
scared of SPAs, the learning curve involved and how they basically change the
role of a front end dev to more of a fullstack dev.

I once considered myself a front end dev but these days I'm using SPAs,
running NodeJS, pulling & managing data from REST APIs, sending / retrieving
stuff from a database, managing NoSQL database, using serverless functions,
working with websockets and GraphQL etc..

Am I still considered a front end developer? Because I know front end
developers who still carve a living out of HTML / CSS / jQuery alone. They'd
be toast when it comes to present day job interviews for example for front end
positions. It just seems like we need to split 'front end developer' in to
about 3 or 4 levels to better represent people's skillset / what's expected of
them.

~~~
macca321
There's a huge element when working with SPA developers of reinventing the
wheels that the browser and HTTP provide.

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thrownaway954
It's kind of cool that the first post on jQuery blog was from Leah Silber in
August of 1997.

[http://blog.jquery.com/1997/08/](http://blog.jquery.com/1997/08/)

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mythrwy
I haven't used jQuery in awhile but positional selectors being removed is a
pretty big change.

FTA

Specifically, jQuery 3.4.0 is deprecating :first, :last, :eq, :even, :odd,
:lt, :gt, and :nth

~~~
panarky
_> Keep in mind we will still support the positional methods, such as .first,
.last, and .eq. Anything you can do with positional selectors, you can do with
positional methods instead. They perform better anyway._

~~~
hinkley
Except half of the point of css selectors was that you strongly encouraged
your coworkers to use similar selectors for style and behavior. Now you have
two implementations of the same thing and over a long enough time horizon that
always breaks.

~~~
Macha
But these aren't standard selectors so you couldn't use them for style anyway.

~~~
hinkley
OH! You are correct. Been staring at backend code too long.

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maxpert
Loved it then love it now. The fact that it was most loved library on
Stackoverflow should say something about the relentless simplicity of jQuery.

~~~
smt88
What is simpler about jQuery than modern vanilla JS?

~~~
sedatk
Terse and composable/fluent API. You don’t have that on plain DOM methods.

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EnderMB
JavaScript has moved on considerably over the past decade, but any time I have
to write any JS I still yearn for the simple syntax of jQuery.

Obviously, the abstractions were what made jQuery what it is, and what made it
so powerful, but I wish that vanilla JS were to take a leaf out of jQuery's
book and adopt some of its syntax ideas.

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perttir
It is a tool that make some jobs easier. Just like vue/react is an tool which
makes some jobs easier.

You just need to know when to pick the right tool for the job.

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taesu
JQuery will be always in a special place in my heart.

~~~
BaconJuice
Always. It was powerful for its time in terms of capabilities and I got so
much done with it. We still have some old apps running Jquery in production
with no issues. I miss it sometimes haha

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dagw
Last year I started a fairly big new web app after a few years away from web
development and started out wanting to not use JQuery since I knew that was
what the cool kids where doing. But everywhere I turned I kept bumping into
libraries or widgets I wanted to use that wanted to pull in JQuery as a
dependency. And most of the times any JQuery-free alternative I could find
wasn't as feature complete or didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.
Eventually I just gave up included JQuery.

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ndnxhs
I dont hate jQuery but I just find it useless for modern web dev. If you can
ignore internet explorer you can do everything jquey did with just vanilla js.

I tried vuejs recently for a little interactive page on my website and found
it revolutionary compared to jquery.

~~~
noir_lord
> If you can ignore internet explorer you can do everything jquey did with
> just vanilla js.

There are still lots of people who can't sadly.

That said while yes you can do everything jQuery does in vanilla JS (jQuery is
written in vanilla JS after all) you often end up with more code than using
jquery which means more to read through, more to understand.

So saying it is useless is a bit harsh, it may be useless for you but it's not
for many and if you look at what the jquery folks are doing with deprecations
you can see they are refactoring jquery to use the vanilla js stuff that was
added in large part because of jquery so it'll likely definite itself out of
existence at some point anyway.

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submeta
Whenever I review legacy (PHP) code from say 2010/2011 with lots of jQuery, I
realize what a relief it is to use frontend frameworks / libraries. There was
a reason why those frameworks were developed. And that does not go away just
because it feels right when I spin up a Django project and start using jQuery
to make my views / templates more dynamic. Eventually when that project grows
larger, I realize that going that path won‘t cut it.

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pxtail
I always find it weird that everyone is bashing jQuery nowadays and offers
Ract/Vue as replacement - isn't React/Vue working with blank slate and
injecting page content into container? jQuery usually works as "enhancement"
for page content actually returned from server

Are you all building websites like that? Returning blank page from server and
then filling all content on client side?

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anthony_doan
I use Bootstrap 4.3 for my side project and I still find myself enjoying
jQuery.

It's a great library and I am thankful for the people who have made and
contribute to it. I've used it during my web development career years ago
before client side rendering was a thing.

I believe if they were to meet their goal of modernizing it, jQuery will be
going on much longer regardless of other framework out there.

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manishsharan
Love Jquery -- but hate Jquery slim build. Let's say you create a widget that
expects jquery animate or ajax for some functionality. You publish your widget
and users who use your widget like it and then they try to optimize page load
time by using Jquery slim. And all of a sudden , some parts of your widget are
working and some are not.

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pier25
A couple of months ago I had to implement a drag and drop thing from scratch
in React and I really missed jQuery.

Reactive data with vdom is nice for some use cases, but sometimes the best
solution is to manipulate the dom directly.

Does anyone know of some library that can mix the two approaches?

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joaodlf
Remember when knowing JQuery put you at the forefront of frontend development?
Actually, in those days, "frontend" wasn't really a thing yet. JQuery just
made you a more competent web developer.

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elliotec
Did anybody look at the website on mobile? Embarrassing!

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xx4xx4
is this still a thing?

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neokantian
I really like JQuery! It is just a library in which you call functions. It
does not tell you how to write your code. It is not one of those
frankenmonster frameworks that sucks you dry and tells you what to do.

I am not going to name what obnoxious framework it is about, but I am waiting
for another year or two before they unceremoniously abandon that stuff and
start hyping the next Messiah framework.

