

Ask HN: What's the best way to build Javascript widgets today? - jasongullickson

We're working on moving our site from a straight-up ROR app to hypermedia API on the back-end (still running on Rails) and Javascript/HTML5 on the front.<p>I've used everything from raw Javascript to jQuery to Dojo to build client-side components against a REST API before, and I'm comfortable with going that direction, but I'm asking the community here if something has come along that supersedes these tools for this sort of application?<p>In particular we want to develop a modular set of controls that can operate in a stand-alone fashion, composed only of client-side code but can also be combined and hosted in existing Rails-served pages as well as static HTML.<p>Thoughts?
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justinf
JQuery still seems to be king at the moment. There's some pushback against it
in this new world of a mobile web since it adds size to low-bandwidth pages,
but there doesn't seem to be a risk that it'll be dethroned any time soon.

If I were looking to make a portable and semi-futureproof toolkit right now,
I'd use jQuery as a base, but limit myself to some big features, like dom
queries, events, and ajax. Then I'd make sure I had it sandboxed inside all my
code via anonymous functions (function($) { /* my code */ })(jQuery); so I
could swap in a lighter replacement later on without a headache.

~~~
tjholowaychuk
jquery is codesmell of all codesmells

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tjholowaychuk
Check out <https://github.com/component>

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dotborg
Moving stuff into CSS seems to be a good direction. i.e. you don't have to
code shadows/animations/etc. in JS anymore.

