• Category
      No categories were found that matched your criteria.
      • Manufacturer
        No manufacturers were found that matched your criteria.
      • Products
        No product/service was found that matched your criteria.
          • Knowledge
            No article were found that matched your criteria.
          Knowledge groups
          KB archive
          Knowledge Filters

          jQuery Is Still the Dominant JavaScript Library

          Tuesday, July 12, 2022

          jQuery was launched way back in 2006, when the term “Ajax” was at its peak. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is now long gone from the developer vernacular, along with other JavaScript technologies of that early Web 2.0 era. But jQuery has stood the test of time. Indeed, up till very recently, it was still growing year-over-year. To find out the latest on this enduring technology, I spoke to one of the developers who continues to maintain jQuery, Gołębiowski-Owczarek

          What is jQuery’s role in today’s web, when the leading browsers (even Safari!) are much more compliant with web standards? Also, the JavaScript standard itself has significantly improved over the past decade, especially after the release of ECMAScript 6 in 2015.

          As noted, React has become the most talked-about JavaScript library of today. Modern frameworks, notably Next.js, have been founded on React. Other popular frameworks, such as Angular (the successor to AngularJS) have their own ecosystem of libraries. Today’s JavaScript frameworks also allow you to break the UI into components, making it easier to scale up an application.

          “Those frameworks provide abstractions for easier synchronization between the data and the view,” said Gołębiowski-Owczarek about the likes of Next.js and Angular. “So their users no longer need to modify/access the DOM directly so often, and are often discouraged from doing that. In such an environment, using jQuery doesn’t make much sense. But that’s just a small part of the whole web ecosystem.”

          It’s clear that jQuery is no longer an optimal way for developers to add JavaScript functionality to their website or application, especially if it needs to scale. The fact that GitHub contributions to jQuery are well down on its peak years (2006 till around 2013) also signifies that not much more can be done to make jQuery more compatible with our current web.

          But that’s ok. jQuery has lasted a lot longer than most developers would’ve expected, given it came out near the beginning of Web 2.0. It still does the job it set out to do, after all, and it remains a convenient JavaScript library for developers to reach for.

          In any case, jQuery will be embedded in tens of millions of WordPress sites for years to come. It may even outlast React.

           

          Source: https://thenewstack.io

          back to top
          Filters