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Hating jQuery will not make you cool

Nitish Kumar Singh on March 11, 2019

Hating jQuery will not make you cool; However, adoring it will also not make you cool.

But In 2019 adoring jQuery will make you dumb.

So,

Leave the jQuery as it is and continue your life without it.

Tobias SN • Mar 11 '19

Actually some people still prefer to just use Vanilla JS + jQuery because they feel they don’t need a big library like Vue or React. And no, that doesn’t make them dumb, it just means they’re good at not depending on a single library.

Nitish Kumar Singh • Mar 11 '19

There was a time when I used to use jQuery of selecting element because that makes my life easy but Now we can do the same with Vanilla JavaScript also.

Tobias SN • Mar 11 '19

Maybe, but jQuery still allows people to write code that’s smaller and sometimes simpler than when using Vanilla JS, and some prefer that.

Nitish Kumar Singh • Mar 11 '19

I completely agree with you that people use it and it is simpler. jQuery take around 30kb and beginners most of the time don't care about this cost.

People usually use 5-10 features and ships complete jQuery which is very bad.

Tobias SN • Mar 11 '19

Actually 5-10 features in 30 kB is not bad at all.

Nitish Kumar Singh • Mar 11 '19

how?

When you can do the same with Vanilla JavaScript by writing little more code.

In 2019 you need not to write very much code compared to jQuery.

Tobias SN • Mar 11 '19

Here's an AJAX call in jQuery:

$.ajax({
    url: "/faq/ajax",
    datatype: 'json',
    type: "POST",
    data: {search:'banana'},
    success: (r) => {
        console.log(r['name']);
    }
});

And it's Vanilla JS equivalent:

var r = new XMLHttpRequest();
r.open("POST", "/faq/ajax", true);
r.onreadystatechange = () => {
    if (r.readyState != 4 || r.status != 200) {
        return;
    }
    var a = JSON.parse(r.responseText);
    console.log(a.name);
};
r.send("search=banana");

To me, the jQuery version is clearly simpler and easier to read, with much less boilerplate.

And remember that the Fetch API still isn't fully supported on some browsers, so some people will still prefer AJAX.

Nitish Kumar Singh • Mar 11 '19 • Edited

Yes, Vanilla JavaScript code is pretty ugly and I completely agree with that but using library just because your code doesn't look pretty is not a good idea at all. It will cost you a lot ( 30 kb).

Remember You can make the code more readable just by breaking it into function.

function ajaxRequest(url, params, callback){
    var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    request.onreadystatechange = function()
    {
        if (request.readyState == 4 && request.status == 200)
        {
            callback(request.responseText); 
        }
    }; 
    request.open('GET', url);
    request.send();

}
    ajaxRequest('https://www.domain.com', null,function(response){
       console.log(response);
    });

Tobias SN • Mar 11 '19

That was just an example. There could be a bunch of these cases in the code, and besides, 30 kB isn’t all that much anyway.

Nitish Kumar Singh • Mar 11 '19 • Edited

I completely agree with you but this is 2019. So things are very much changed, Now Vanilla JavaScript is also very much powerful. You need not to depend on jQuery of basic stuffs.

In term of size React( React + React DOM ) and jQuery 3 are almost same.