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Do you still work with jQuery?

Ben Halpern on November 17, 2021

For folks who still work with jQuery, for personal or professional projects, what is the overall context of this work? Do you expect this to be refactored at any point?

Tyler Smith • Nov 17 '21

I still use jQuery with WordPress, and I don't expect that I'll stop any time soon. Most of the time a Wordpress plugin will need to load jQuery anyway, and it's really nice for sprinkling JavaScript onto a static page. I write less code than I would with Vanilla JS, and it has animations & ajax built in. Sure, I could piece animations & ajax together another way, but I don't see the reason when jQuery has both.

I'm not a luddite: I use React when I build full-blown web applications. I've also used ES6 features to build apps with Vanilla JS before. But unless bundle size is a major constraint, I still feel perfectly happy reaching for jQuery in 2021.

I wrote about this more extensively in my article with the clickbait-y title, "Hating jQuery doesn't make you cool." Link below 😊

Hating jQuery doesn't make you cool

Tyler Smith ・ Jul 27 '20 ・ 3 min read

#jquery #javascript

Matthew Daly • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Have you looked at Alpine.js at all? I quite like that as a jQuery replacement because:

It's tiny - it and Axios together are still only a fraction the size of jQuery
It provides a more declarative API, largely copied from Vue

These days I don't really like including jQuery by default on new projects because a lot of it simply isn't needed, but at the same time doing a lot of that stuff in vanilla JS can be a chore. Alpine's so far proven to be a good solution for what I used to fall back to using jQuery for.

Tyler Smith • Nov 18 '21

Alpine is absolutely amazing. It's become my favorite tool for adding interactivity on server-rendered apps that I build with frameworks like Laravel. And Alpine recently added an equivalent of jQuery's slideToggle(), which is the feature I needed most often from jQuery.

I'm not terribly concerned about the extra kilobytes I get from using jQuery. jQuery doesn't block the DOM from rendering, and it doesn't require activation bootstrapping the way that a framework would: it just needs to download and parse. It's very different than React where you can't render anything until the library is downloaded, parsed, and your app code executed. Even server-rendered React has issues with links not working until the app is fully hydrated.

Avoiding extra kilobytes is nice, but it's easy to go down a rabbit hole where we focus on reducing the kilobytes of JavaScript because it's easier to measure than other higher-impact UX like avoiding page jank, creating useful error states, avoiding responsive issues, etc. Alpine feels nicer to use in a lot of cases though!

ImTheDeveloper • Nov 18 '21

In the same way I'm doing with Vue.js, drop in the script tag and swap out the JQuery. I'll check out Alpine, Vue I just seemed to "get it" quite quick.

Tyler Smith • Nov 18 '21

Alpine has almost everything I like about Vue without the build the steps. It's one of the best front-end tools to come out in the past few years.

ImTheDeveloper • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Yep with the cdn script there is no build for Vue either so fully with you on such a low impact way to improve

vuejs.org/v2/guide/installation.ht...

Phil Wolstenholme • Nov 18 '21

+1 for Alpine, I love it when working with server rendered pages.

Jan Peterka • Nov 18 '21

Do you prefer ajax to fetch for some particular reason? as BE dev I'm bit lost in these things, so I will be glad for more insigth into this :)

Tyler Smith • Nov 18 '21

I sure do. Fetch is too low level for my taste: I don't like having to parse the response for the HTTP code to decide how to handle errors. I almost always prefer jQuery's ajax() method or the Axios library for ajax instead of raw fetch requests. They handle a bunch of things automatically that I'd have to code myself with fetch.

Ben Halpern • Nov 17 '21

Personally it's been a couple years since I've worked with jQuery. In general I'd say it's only a good thing if you can refactor your code to vanilla use of modern native dom query helpers, fetch calls, etc.

Conner Ow • Nov 17 '21

I heard a few years ago that jquery was outdated and wasn't really in use anymore. I usually use plain DOM and created a little function to help me with document.querySelector()

const $ = tag => document.querySelector(tag);

Rasmus Schultz • Nov 18 '21

Yep, I often use this:

const $ = sel => [...document.querySelectorAll(sel)];

This gives you useful array methods like filter and map and works for empty sets, much like jQuery. 🙂

𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Nov 17 '21 • Edited

Yes. No plans to refactor. It makes mine and my developer's lives a lot easier.

Our projects are LAMP stack and don't use modern JS frontends.

Ben Halpern • Nov 17 '21

I wrote this post years ago about jQuery at the time...

Long Live jQuery

Ben Halpern ・ May 24 '16 ・ 3 min read

But have since come to think that it is effectively no longer needed (I think the fetch API put me over the top). Can you elaborate on what keeps you around the most?

𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Nov 17 '21

Predominantly the readability. I find jQuery a lot easier to read than JS.

I see this site referenced a lot: youmightnotneedjquery.com/ But all it does for me is prove how much I prefer jQuery!

Take the getJson function for example:

jQuery

$.getJSON('/my/url', function(data) {

});

Javascript

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open('GET', '/my/url', true);

request.onload = function() {
  if (this.status >= 200 && this.status < 400) {
    // Success!
    var data = JSON.parse(this.response);
  } else {
    // We reached our target server, but it returned an error

  }
};

request.onerror = function() {
  // There was a connection error of some sort
};

request.send();

I know which I prefer...

jQuery also comes with the added benefit of slideToggle() functions, fadeIn/Out() functions, etc.

And I can just $('.classname') to target something, rather than document.getElementsByClassName(className)... it's just such an effort to write that much.

Time is money, and jQuery helps me do what I need to do quicker ! :)

I appreciate my team and I would need to transition to Vanilla JS if we start to use more frontend frameworks, and we are looking to bring in Vue to some of our projects in the future. But our LAMP systems (Wordpress/Drupal/CodeIgnighter) are still our bread-and-butter projects, and using jQuery in them just makes our lives easier.

I'd also argue modern frontend frameworks are still mostly in their adolescent stages, where they're still trying to stabilise themselves/their role in the future of the web... Vue has been around for 7 years, React 8 years, and Angular only 5 years; whereas jQuery has evolved over 15 years and understands its place in the world.

Victorio Berra • Nov 18 '21

There is tons of software out there still using it, we use jQuery DataTables and DataTables Editor since they are very polished and work great. We also have a lot of legacy code in production and sometimes a little jQuery can deliver the interactivity we need on the page without needing to use a modern frontend framework with build steps and bundling and all that.

Refactoring also takes time and there is a lot to do and a lot of things that need to be built before there is spare time to refactor things that are working just fine in production and are not overly complex to maintain. You also have to weigh the costs of bringing in complex SPA frameworks, build steps, cicd stuff, and tooling that a whole team will need to learn and that will be around for a while.

We have some web software that is in prod and that is 20 years old. Is there any framework like React, Vue, Angular that are in prod for 20 years with no updates needed?

Pedro Figueiredo • Nov 17 '21

Not since about 2 years ago, but I got so used to their selector syntax, that I just use $ instead of document.querySelector in the chrome dev tools - yeah that is already implement in there by default 😎

Luke Inglis • Nov 19 '21

Nope but I think the main point is that hating on jQuery just because it is jQuery is cargo-culting.

Tyler Smith • Nov 20 '21

That's the point I was trying to make. There's nothing wrong with preferring other tools over jQuery or opting for vanilla JS.

Thomas Junkツ • Nov 18 '21

In my sparetime I do not use jQuery. But in my professional work day, it has to be on my toolbelt because our company is supporting applications with over 10+ years lifecycles (public sector clients). So there is no way around jQuery because back in the day what else did we have?

Do I expect this to be refactored? No, unless a customer asks us to do so and pays that job. But why should someone do that? Customers pay for working products - and the product does well with jQuery.

Diana Le • Nov 19 '21

Professionally we'll probably still be using jQuery for a while. We build a large number of sites every year and we have so many types of functionality that rely on jQuery plugins: custom sliders, media lightboxes, form validation, interactive data tables, etc. that it would take a bit of time to figure out compatible vanilla versions. We looked at switching to vanilla JS a few years ago but unfortunately that was before ES6 and the syntax wasn't friendly and we still had to support older versions of IE.

I would love to slowly start updating the code but unfortunately when you have entire design systems built around the existing plugins and we're efficient in terms of building sites, it's hard for us to switch and make the business case for it.

Natalia Asteria • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

No. I don't work with it anymore and don't have any requirements to work with it.

Simply being that it's unneeded for most of my works, even if I do need selectors there is Document.querySelectorAll.

Adam Davis • Nov 17 '21

I work in healthcare tech and a lot of my company's products make heavy use of jQuery. There's been some push to remake some things in React and to start using React for newer projects, but I'm skeptical that it'll actually happen any time soon.

Andrew Bone • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Also in 15 years people will be doing posts like this saying 'do you still use React?' 😅

Jeysson Guevara • Nov 19 '21

I was in a project that used jQuery quite heavily. It was too old, big and complex to get it replaced, the backend and frontend coupling also made any migration idea basically impossible.

Yet, it was really fun to explore ways to insert React in the new pages, cope with React/jQuery conflicts and all that stuff.

domonic • Nov 19 '21 • Edited

So when they add static typing to shitescript (chromescript) the crappy language for manipulating xml documents, are we then to assume you will bin/wrewrite all your current vomit/text files that get transexualised into... normal js?. tadaaa!. js devs are an embarasment. listen to yourself. 40% of the web is wordpress and doesn't care for your crap. were waiting for js to die. Everyone on the planet older than 10 years old know for a fact .js is wank and will be replaced soon as others can target the browser. But apple/google drag heels on purpose to get you on the apps. The webs been stuck in the 90s for a decade and is dying a slow death. Desktop experience is dead.

Eljay-Adobe • Nov 18 '21

No. I had extensive experience with jQuery — including rewriting it from scratch (long story) — and I am a big fan of Vanilla.js.

Although I do use 𝐋𝐄𝑽𝐈𝑨𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍 Programming's helper, and I define it exactly that way (verbatim).

Nitish Dayal • Nov 19 '21

Still use it professionally. Frankly I've never worked anywhere that didn't have some legacy jQuery somewhere in the application. As much as I'd love to go through and rip it all out, it's not a business priority and I have enough on my plate.

Max Ong Zong Bao • Nov 18 '21

I still use jquery, cause with bootstrap you gain a nice UI with beautiful & professional templates without alot of effort in building the front-end or I had limited resources and time to build something out.

K • Nov 18 '21

Somehow I dodged that bullet. :D

In 2006 when jQuery was released, I was neck deep in PHP and I didn't build web apps with JavaScript until 2011. At that time I had the impression jQuery was legacy and nobody uses it anymore, so I didn't bother to look more into it.

I built my first JS project with ExtJS 4 in 2011.

Then I had a short project at university in 2014, where I used Ember.js, so I guess I used jQuery indirectly, haha.

In the next job I got in 2015, they were already using React, so I went with that, and later did some React-Native projects as a freelancer later.

But the first JavaScript book I read 2011 was "Pro JavaScript Techniques" by John Resig, so I guess, I can't deny that jQuery had some influence on my JS journey :D

Rex • Nov 21 '21

To me, it’s the component mental model the frameworks like React, Angular or Blazor offer makes the difference, making the app well structured and maintainable. It’s not easy for beginners or even experienced programmers to get in to habit to write components as building blocks with tools like JQuery.

ImTheDeveloper • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Legacy stuff yes, when I'm being lazy I generally opt for dropping in Vue from a CDN link and working from that. It's re-work but tidies up a lot of the jquery spaghetti into some structure and makes things a bit more data driven with reactivity (personal preference). I actually think this is one of the major benefits to Vue which is generally overlooked.

Plamen Ivanov • Nov 20 '21

I still use it in my personal projects (often together with Vue or React) when I need to touch stuff on a lower level (modify the DOM directly, write complex selectors etc.), which doesn't happen that often, but I would rather write a fast one liner than deal with the vanilla javascript DOM manipulation methods.

Brian M. • Nov 17 '21

I work with it when I have to, but given the choice will go with vanilla js or something more modern when needed. I sometimes have to work with older systems (magento 1, old junky wordpress sites, etc.) and removing a jquery dependency is out of scope.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 17 '21

I have a couple of big projects that use jQuery. We expect to keep it until the entire sites are rebuilt, because there's no point replacing it really.

When I edit javascript files that're already using jQuery, sometimes I use it and sometimes I write modern vanilla javascript, but these sites have no build process that would convert modern script into anything suitable for obsolete browsers - and some sites still have to support vintage tech.

Toby Parent • Nov 17 '21 • Edited

I work with a few clients for whom sites were built during the Browser Wars days, when jQuery was everywhere like a battlefield hospital. Fifteen years later, these folks are still using jQuery, Backbone (precursor cousin to Angular) and perl. And they actively resist updating. They want the code maintained at this point, because it works and it's intimately tied to many aspects of their business.

Do they need jQuery? Absolutely not. Would the business benefit from an overhaul? Absolutely. Can they afford an overhaul? Likely, if done with a strategic plan, in stages. But they are terrified of having this spaghetti code castle collapse if someone makes a significant change.

So until i can convince them to either replace parts in stages or to run parallel servers so we can deploy and test under load... They're sticking with what works.

Ishaan Sheikh • Nov 18 '21

We work with ASP websites which has jQuery support inbuilt. My leads still suggest to write jQuery over vanilla to maintain consistency since old codebase is in jQuery. I don't think we are moving to any framework or Vanilla in next 8-10 years. Some of the clients still asks that there users are using older browsers, so jQuery is the best way to handle that case.

Dendi Handian • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Those who do freelance for admin panel apps using old tech like PHP and Bootstrap CSS probably still stick to jQuery. And maybe Wordpress developer still use it

𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Nov 19 '21

PHP is not old tech...

Dendi Handian • Nov 22 '21

Maybe old-fashion tech

Anil Seervi • Nov 18 '21

Top level awaits tho

Andrew Bone • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

Helper functions can also be a thing.

const getJSON = async (url, callback) => {
  const response = await fetch(url);
  const data = await response.json();
  callback(data)
}

getJSON("/my/url", console.log);

𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Nov 19 '21

I understand where you're coming from, but for modern Internet speeds 30kb is nothing. Sure, it's worth taking into account if you're launching a site for a territory which suffers from slow Internet speeds, but for most affluent countries I'd argue 30kb is not worth losing sleep over.

In the UK the average Internet speed in 2015 was 13 MBps. https://www.mindgems.com/info/file-download-time-calculator/?FileSize=30&Units=kilobytes It really takes no time at all to download such a tiny file.

Arvind Padmanabhan • Nov 18 '21

Absolutely and I love it. Not considering JS frameworks right now.

lamka02sk • Nov 18 '21

Unfortunately, yes. But we are slowly rewriting it to vanilla.

Bobby Iliev • Nov 17 '21

Speaking of jquery, here’s a great story that I’ve recently read

devdojo.com/tnylea/its-ok-jquery-i...

crtl • Nov 18 '21

It depends. Its just easier to do with jquery but nowadays u have all the sweet tools in vanilla so you dont actually need it anymore.
But it still adds much convinience like event handlers, dom traversal and method chaining.

DevFranPR • Nov 18 '21

Stoped using it the moment I realize document.querySelector() was a thing in JS. I don't miss it at all. For legacy code will be used for a time but I hope WP and Bootstrap get rid of it in the near future builds to have less things to worry about in projects who uses this tools.

Silvestar Bistrović • Nov 17 '21

I'm using it when I absolutely have to.
Even when the project uses jQuery, I still write vanilla JavaScript.

Danny Engelman • Nov 17 '21 • Edited

Interesting fact; if you (only) use 50 KB+ jQuery for its Selectors, IE9 was the last browser to implement .querySelector .... in 2011

Jesse M. Holmes • Nov 17 '21

I skipped jQuery while I was playing the tuba. By the time I came back, Angular 2 was a baby, so I jumped back in with TypeScript.

Tobias Frölich • Nov 18 '21

Yeah, we still use jQuery in some (older) projects. I personally wouldn't vote for using it in "new" projects, however, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Marco Damaceno • Nov 19 '21

Yes, I still use it. Jquery is just a tool. A tool never gets old.

okyanusoz • Jan 15 '22

These days, I use useRef in React.

Matt Ellen • Nov 18 '21

I inadvertently work with jQuery as it's part of SignalR. If we move away from SignalR then I'll almost certainly get rid of jQuery.

Phil Wolstenholme • Nov 18 '21

There's also Cash, which replicates much of jQuery, including its lovely chained API, but uses modern JavaScript below the hood: github.com/fabiospampinato/cash

manu • Nov 20 '21

Yes, I still work with jQuery for my app, but only because the libraries I use require jQuery to work.
Otherwise, I just use vanilla JS, because it is robust.

Dương Thanh Tân • Nov 18 '21 • Edited

I still use it when working with Shopify projects, usually because it's convenient to copy UI logic on codepen, a lot of amazing example up there still use jQuery.