
The Future of JQuery UI and JQuery Mobile - apsdehal
http://blog.jqueryui.com/2017/12/the-future-of-jquery-ui-and-jquery-mobile/
======
collinmanderson
jQuery is still quite relevant and helpful. Despite the hype with newer
libraries, jQuery is used on 73% of _all_ websites.
[https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library...](https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library/all)

I often tell myself, ok, I'm going to just use vanilla JS for this one, but
compared to jQuery, it's way too verbose. Try doing $('.my-elements').show()
in vanilla js.

The problem is the jQuery foundation has become too bureaucratic, making
contributions harder. Example:
[https://github.com/globalizejs/globalize/pull/703](https://github.com/globalizejs/globalize/pull/703)

~~~
codazoda
That's actually a good example. My gut feeling was simply to write the
following.

document.getElementsByClassName("my-class")[0].style.display = 'block';

The PlainJS site mentions that it's not quite that simple and suggests writing
your own show() and hide() functions if you're avoiding jQuery.

[https://plainjs.com/javascript/effects/hide-or-show-an-
eleme...](https://plainjs.com/javascript/effects/hide-or-show-an-element-42/)

~~~
collinmanderson
Right, and that still doesn't handle applying the action to all _all_ items of
that class.

It would need to be something like this, though it still doesn't automatically
handle inline vs block:

document.querySelectorAll('.my-
elements').forEach(function(el){el.style.display = 'block'})

And apparently there are issues even with that: [https://css-
tricks.com/snippets/javascript/loop-queryselecto...](https://css-
tricks.com/snippets/javascript/loop-queryselectorall-matches/)

~~~
exizt88
For reference, this is how you do this in jQuery: $('.my-elements').show()

------
tcfunk
Seems like most of the comments on here pertain to the relevance of jQuery,
rather than jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

Sure most sites still use jQuery, but do very many use jQuery UI anymore?
jQuery Mobile? I've never seen a project use jQuery Mobile.

~~~
invalidusernam3
I tried to use jQuery Mobile for a project once many years ago. It was a
disaster, I ended up rewriting the entire thing

~~~
srcmap
If you have to select a mobile framework today, what would you choose?

I play with Framework 7 [https://framework7.io/](https://framework7.io/) and
it looks very nice.

Any other suggestions?

~~~
invalidusernam3
F7 is my favourite as well. Two of the featured apps on the home page are mine
:D

------
darth_mastah
Considering current trends for creating complex applications for the client I
do not believe jQuery has much of a future anyway. It had been good while it
lasted, I used to like jQuery a lot until better tools came along. These days
libraries for DOM manipulation seem not only obsolete but also standing in a
way of focused and efficient development. Let jQuery rest in peace and be
remembered for its past greatness.

~~~
osrec
Disagree with this somewhat. I think jQuery still has a place in web app
development, especially when you need something done fast. You just need to be
careful not to over-bloat your js. jQuery has helped my team get stuff done
really fast more than a few times in the last couple of months.

~~~
chmln
> I think jQuery still has a place in web app development, especially when you
> need something done fast

I never got this argument and am curious - what exactly does jQuery do faster?

I've left it behind for CSS animations and native Dom selectors years ago and
haven't looked back.

~~~
fein
It's certainly easier to just include JQ on an existing site and get to work
for simple stuff, but I just deal with Angular now. Easy enough to get up and
running with ngcli, and a year down the road the codebase won't look like the
abortion which is loads of jquery.

------
potench
The slack url in this post overflows the text and zooms the page out on my
phone making for an apropos blog reading experience about the future of jQuery
mobile. Photo here
[https://twitter.com/potench/status/943950784592363520](https://twitter.com/potench/status/943950784592363520)

~~~
darth_mastah
Same here. +1

------
git-pull
jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile are deprecated. Take in mind, it comes from an age
before HTML 5 became set in stone. Browsers weren't caught up yet. JavaScript
libraries weren't plentiful and mature as they are now. CSS frameworks like
bootstrap also didn't exist until years later.

And there was more optimism toward the concept of creating a widget toolkit
and a webview mobile app. And while to an extent - we embrace that now in some
form - it didn't work so well the first go around [1]. Media queries becoming
a normal practice and CSS frameworks made jQuery Mobile feel clunky. Heavy
duty mobile apps went native - and I can't know where they are now.

For jQuery UI, over time, the theming got a bit old. And stuff like "Buttons"
([https://jqueryui.com/button/](https://jqueryui.com/button/)), you can
already get via CSS. Most CSS frameworks, for that matter, do a lot of the
widgets with far less JS, if any at all.

I'll miss them. They were a stepping stone in getting us to where we are now.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-
bigges...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-
mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/)

------
andrew_
> In the past, when someone wanted to join the jQuery UI or jQuery Mobile
> teams we expected them to contribute to the library as a whole.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of that. I was a jQuery UI team member in the
'09 - '11 period (I can't recall exact dates) and I only worked on certain
components, though I did participate in discussion and planning for the
platform as a whole. It was also common for contributors/team members to pitch
new plugins that weren't worked on by the entire team.

So maybe this is just jQuery UI getting back to it's open source roots more so
than anything. I'm sad to see that the project has fallen on hard times, but
I'm not shocked given the direction most of front end webdev has moved towards
these days. The amount and types of UI frameworks and component libs available
today are myriad. And at jQuery UI's peak (and hell, jQuery as well) there
were only a few.

I'd like to add a meta-note that Scott Gonzalez was always great to work with,
and if you want to read some interesting, independent thoughts, he's a good
follow on the twitters.

------
dexwiz
People in the comment threads seem to be confusing jQuery UI with jQuery.
jQuery UI is collection of interactions, effects, and widgets built on the
more ubiquitous jQuery library.

~~~
saas_co_de
jQuery UI was also tightly tied to Filament Group so it was a commercial
product looking to capitalize on the jQuery name. That whole think was not so
successful and jQuery UI was never that great. 5+ years ago it was bloated and
buggy and it has not seen much development since.

~~~
andrew_
Filament Group was a sponsor but the project was not "tightly tied" to the
company. I believe that's a bit of FUD right there.

~~~
whostolemyhat
Or a mistake, due to successful sponsorship. No need to assume the worst.

------
muxator
Could someone please tell me how modern DOM manipulation looks like these
days?

I understand jQuery is old, but do not have fresh information on what's used
nowadays.

~~~
dbbk
With native APIs, jQuery was only useful for providing an abstraction layer
over browsers' differing implementations, but they are mostly standardised
now.

------
butz
Good times with those gradient styled widgets, but today they should be
retired and developers should start looking at upcoming tech, like Houdini
project [https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini-
drafts/wiki](https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini-drafts/wiki) .

------
sebringj
When I used it many years back, both UI and Mobile, I found it kludgy and odd.
The UI wasn't all that pretty compared to Bootstrap so I just started using
that and actually forgot about this entirely. I think that's where the actual
migration started, with Bootstrap. The other frameworks started popping up
later when jQuery wasn't scaling for UI code such as Ember and using Mustache
then later Angular, then React, Angular 2, Vue, etc so now, so now jQuery
UI/Mobile is completely irrelevant. I would also throw in Sencha extjs as dead
too and classify that as enterprise jquery UI.

------
DonHopkins
jQuery certainly did a commendable job of lowering the bar for web developers!

So low that many people thought of jQuery as a way to avoid learning
JavaScript. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.)

That's why there's such a huge demand for a free jQuery plugin that can add,
subtract, multiply, divide and compare numbers.

[http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-
large.gif](http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-large.gif)

"-1 not enough jQuery"

[https://github.com/cbrandolino/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-
plugi...](https://github.com/cbrandolino/jQuery-basic-arithmetic-plugin)

jQuery basic arithmetic plugin

$.add(arg1, arg2 [, args...]) adds two or more numbers;

$.subtract(arg1, arg2 [, args...]) subtracts two or more numbers, the leftmost
being the first operand;

$.multiply(arg1, arg2 [, args...]) multiplies two or more numbers;

$.divide(arg1, arg2 [, args...]) divides two or more numbers, the leftmost
being the first operand;

$.equals(arg1, arg2 [, args...]) checks two or more numbers for equality.

------
olliej
I remember years ago (when I was still active in browser dev) having to argue
with people who wanted jquery to be embedded in the browser and/or be part of
the DOM spec.

I'd like to imagine that this kind of article would help people understand why
browsers don't just do that and instead try to develop general APIs that
enable frameworks to grow and evolve or simply be replaced as new dev models
spring into being.

<grumbling>

Consider this: jQuery needed a bunch of DOM operations to be very fast and
have certain behaviors (it's a long time ago, but iirc there were selectors,
property apis, certain kinds of nodelist behaviour). Multiple webdevs proposed
build jQuery APIs into the browser, so rather than making the underlying
operations fast, we'd just have the critical path implemented natively inside
the browser. While that would have solved some performance problems it would
not have helped any other framework.

By instead making those core functionality faster, and providing general APIs
for the things jQuery needed, other frameworks could also make use of them.

My hope is that by seeing these posts (which are honestly tending toward EoL
notices) people will remember than no one library is ever likely to be
permanent, and will stop asking for browser to just include the libraries
internally.

</grumbling>

------
ElijahLynn
Can't wait for Matrix to become the defacto tool to connect teams, instead of
dropping IRC for Slack, they will drop IRC for Matrix. It makes me sad to see
JQuery moving to Slack when I think they would be better off moving to Matrix
instead. I hope they at least considered Matrix.

~~~
andrewem
I've never heard of Matrix, but it looks like this is the project:
[https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

------
JeanMarcS
I’ve heavily used jqueryUI and can’t thanks the team enough for all the work
they done during those years.

But when I opened the blog post on my iPhone and got only a small column,
around the quarter of the screen, with content, I thought about how ironic it
was, regarding the jquery mobile topic.

------
jiggliemon
Oracle JET (javascript enterprise toolkit) has a strong dependency on jQuery
UI.

------
SilverSlash
Question to those of you who use JQuery UI: Why JQuery over, say, React?

------
chmike
What are modern alternatives to jQuery mobile ?

------
gotofritz
TL;DR they are both dying

~~~
akras14
Here is real TLDR;

\- Scott Gonzalez has lead the jQuery UI project for many years now and has
helped to improve the quality tremendously.

\- However, we do hope to continue reducing the amount of duplicated code and
widgets in the projects moving anything common to jQuery UI.

\- We think going forward this needs to change; we will now be looking for and
accepting people that are just interested in maintaining a single piece of the
library, requiring a much smaller time contribution.

\- Over time however, we have seen a large decrease in the number of people on
IRC while other projects have had great results with easier to use tools like
Slack.

\- Anyone who is interested can feel free to reach out to Alex Schmitz, the
new team lead for both projects, join our slack channel or even find us on IRC
(we are still there).

~~~
gotofritz
They are just trying to give it a positive spin.

