13 ms·

React is the new jQuery

225 points by brennankreiman 8y ago

parvenu74 8y ago
Let’s not forget that jQuery was a polyfill that allowed JavaScript Devs on all browsers to code to a common baseline. React is a nice —- and popular —- library for building UIs but it’s existence isn’t an indictment of the laziness of standards implementors for browsers (okay, IE mainly) and god-send to developers like jQuery was.
- growtofill 8y ago
  Yes, React isn’t _exactly_ jQuery, but it gives the same level of productivity boost comparing to development with just the modern DOM APIs (querySelector, classList, etc).
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    For a large project, React gives you way, way, way more benefits than jQuery does.
rich-and-poor 8y ago
Oh Brad, you do not know what you are talking about right off the bat. Let's go through your list. 1. Every document has a root node. <div id='app' /> is your root node now. You had a root node before, you have a root node now. 2. Do a search and replace. That's easy. 3. That's another search and replace. 4. You don't need to call a constructor, you don't need to use bind, and you don't need to assign your functions to an variable on your class instance. React allows you to compose things. Make something once and use it everywhere. You write much, much less code. You get lifecycle hooks for when things mount, update, unmount. You get easy templating in JSX. You can also ditch the whole thing for Inferno if you care about having no lisence or company behind it. You also get amazing libraries for state management and async via reactivex.
- steve_adams_86 8y ago
  You also get convention. jQuery didn't offer much of that once you started gluing its functions together... I can usually jump into someone's react code and get what's going on pretty quickly unless they did something really gnarly with incredibly nested props. Even then, at least I still know where to drill down. With jQuery soup, you didn't get that luxury. Being able to have an entire team know how to build components and provide them with functionality is an incredible advantage. I don't love everything about react either, but the ecosystem, somewhat enforced convention, tooling, etc - it's worth it (so far). I love some things about Vue, but it isn't a silver bullet either. Brad seems to be pretty butt hurt about react. If you've worked on a large team without something like react, then worked on one with react, it really shines. It's a major productivity booster. It's not perfect, but it's very good.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    jQuery had a lot of convention, for both it and it's plugins. jQuery + co. have very consistent "look and feel"
    - girvo 8y ago
      I agree when you’re talking about the most well known of plugins and so on, but IME for application code all that goes out the window. A lot of developers really didn’t know how to write JavaScript back then. Still don’t, but we didn’t then either ;)
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    - steve_adams_86 8y ago
      I agree that the library has great convention. I actually learned quite a bit from that API when I was starting out. The only problem was you could really abuse the usage of the API. I'm realizing now that this isn't a fair comparison. React 'wins' here largely because it has a smaller scope. It's for giving functionality to templates built in the library using a certain approach. jQuery was far more open ended and far less opinionated. That was as much it's strength as it's weakness. It's definitely not a direct comparison. But I do think react is a nice safe tool for larger teams.
mpc 8y ago
We're talking about two totally different programming paradigms here. The end product might be the same but it's more of a question about how you arrive there. With JQuery you're signing up for manual DOM manipulation. It's a challenge to scale that for what's now considered table-stakes for web apps.
statictype 8y ago
If you tear out something like jQuery, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get those accordions to expand and collapse again. If you tear out React, you get a blank page. React is a big commitment. This is probably the only real concern I see. jQuery is a library for DOM manipulation. It can co-exist with many other libraries. React is an entire framework. These days you need jquery less because browsers are more standards compliant and css animations basically work. The trick is about using the right tool for the right job. We have several large react applications - these are user-interaction heavy rich single page apps. But we also use vanilla html and jquery dom manipulations in many other places.
- threatofrain 8y ago
  What does "an entire framework" mean? Because you can just make React the little news and weather widget in the corner of your app / website, as the only React component. Same with Vue. The people for whom ripping out React or Vue leads to a blank page are those who wanted an app from the ground-up. If anything, React is losing because it doesn't include enough out of the box. If you wanted to build a news widget, fine. But if you wanted to build an app, you have to start putting pieces together from 3rd parties (or write your own custom pieces). That's not what a framework sounds like to me, that sounds like figure-out-your-own-framework, and I think that's why Vue is winning. Create React App was a very late response, and I still don't think it's as good as Vue's up-and-going tooling experience.
  - statictype 8y ago
    I guess what I meant was when you build a widget with react - the whole widget has to be react. With jQuery, you're likely building it with html and using jQuery for user interactions or animations (I know - not always true - constructing the markup with $('<tag>') is also useful). So its easier to rip out jQuery and replace it with - say - document.querySelector - or whatnot. I personally think React is overkill if you're pulling it in to do a small widget on a larger non-react page
  - joe_momma 8y ago
    That's because you aren't using Reason-React
nol13 8y ago
<3 jQuery, maybe nostalgia talking but still one of my favorite pieces of software ever. Made DOM manipulation fun.
- meesterdude 8y ago
  > Made DOM manipulation fun. same! Jquery is still quite useful and powerful. This is also what rails does for me; makes web development fun. Or highcharts making charts fun, or elasticsearch making search fun. To me that's a testament to elegantly solving a problem. I just don't get those fuzzies with react.
gcommer 8y ago
> Burn all of your markup down to the ground and replace what you had with <div id="app" /> This isn't totally true -- if you really only wanted to implement a single toggle and leave the rest of the page alone, then you could replace just the relevant DOM elements with a container and render into that fragment of the page. (Though really I'd ask why use React if that's the only value you're getting out of it) > I guess that’s why I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. [...] Projects like Vue are showing that’s not necessary. Except, Vue.js does require a proprietary format; all those v-* attributes and custom components will be need to be migrated if you want to switch away from Vue. Comparatively, React is better in this regard because there are multiple implementations of React (preact, inferno, nerv). Also, JSX is technically optional, and it's really easy to mix markdown, or other formats/templating engines into a React app to handle the content-heavy bits.
- freedomben 8y ago
  I feel like the word "proprietary" means something different to me than the author. When I think of proprietary I think of a closed standard that may or may not be copyrighted/patented. Something like React would not even come close to my definition. Wikipedia seems to agree with me [1], but maybe I'm misinterpreting it: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
superfrank 8y ago
> React is the new jQuery Anyone who uses "the new jQuery" as some sort of insult (as it seems Sara did in her tweet) probably hasn't been a developer for more than a few years or is just trying to sound smarter than they are by bashing an easy target. The reason jQuery got so popular is that it made common tasks so much easier than anything else at the time. Anyone who was doing web development before jQuery knows what a godsend it was at the time. JQuery was a fantastic leap forward for development at the time it was released. JQuery didn't become bad, the rest of the development world caught up and made it unnecessary.
- danShumway 8y ago
  I don't think JQuery ever got bad. It just got unnecessary, like you said. But it took a lot of work to convince people that it was unnecessary. A charitable explanation of Sara's tweet might be that, like with jQuery, it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project. The other comparative downside of JQuery was that components started to rely on it as a shared library, which meant developers suddenly needed to do dependency management. That is (usually) a bad idea. React absolutely does have that problem as well - probably to an even worse degree than jQuery widgets ever did. This is kind of the same concern I have with Vue to be honest. I use Vue for prototyping and will probably use it in some final apps as well. But I'm probably not ever going to use a component that someone else has written if it relies on Vue. IMO Lodash went the right direction with this. A component or library can depend on Lodash, pull in just the functions that they use for a final build, and then nobody else in the entire dev toolchain needs to know or care. No risk of conflicting dependencies, build size stays low, etc... I kind of wonder if the problems Vue solves for me could be solved better by a smaller, lodash-style library instead of a framework.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    Being used to jQuery, I really see no reason not to use it in new projects. I could learn all the new native equivalents, and even then still ending up doing more work than if I'd been using jQuery, just to save a little bit of page load time and filesize, but it would almost certainly not be worth it.
joe_momma 8y ago
Just skip React and Vue and go straight to ReasonML/React, you will end up there in 3 years anyway
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Had that worked well for you? Is it mature enough to use today?
sheeshkebab 8y ago
React has a lot of inertia behind it, although it doesn’t really make things easier. The amount of js code to make even basic things work is high, and with so many different styles of writing react/js code, large codebases require significant effort to keep maintainable. Which is to say, with this much effort put into structuring maintainable react js code, one could pretty much develop in any js ui framework (including jquery, backbone or none whatsoever) - since little of this effort is dependent on react, or made easier by it.
- lilactown 8y ago
  I disagree. Bridging the concerns split between between HTML, JS and CSS helps a ton and would be a lot of code to write if not for React (or similar frameworks).
  - pests 8y ago
    I feel this is because many people confuse Redux (or flux) with React itself. Or the more general problem of not knowing the difference between store state, local component state, and component instance state (the actual JS object's properties.) The new Unstated library leveraging the next Context API is a nice balance I find for state management. It basically just mirrors Reacts setState style update system. Although you do lose the single source of truth pro of Redux.
- joesb 8y ago
  Virtual DOM and ability to derived your DOM state from props and state is not something you can easily done with jQuery or any UI library that doesn't have that concept. It's not something you can easily implement yourself either. That's the main part that makes React code maintainable.
  - quxbar 8y ago
    I agree, this is the part that people seem to be ignoring. Yes, you can make a proof of computational equivalence between jQuery and React, but you cannot deny the massive increase in human usability that an set of components brings. There's far more interesting set of things you can do, Redux + the litany of other related libraries, a vibrant ecosystem unto themselves, prove this. I started my career out slinging jQuery and after 4 years of React I never want to go back.
danielrhodes 8y ago
Moved from Vue to React. A couple things drove this: Typescript support for Vue was kind of weak, and the interception of events and reactive elements ended up creating more bugs. I do love how Vue is easy to get up and going fast, but React seems more compatible with a growing team where you want stronger guarantees.
- johnny22 8y ago
  i hope their switch to managing reactivity via Proxy solves stuff like this.
- jpkeisala 8y ago
  First time I read someone moving from Vue to React. I thought trend was only from React/Angular to Vue?
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Vue works better for small apps, or progressive enhancement (similar to jQuery) React works better for teams working on applications that need build tooling and dependency management anyway. Angular, frankly I don't see why anyone would pick it over the other two. Yeah, it's got more in the box, but that bigger box takes 4x as much effort to lift off the ground.
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benatkin 8y ago
This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader. There are different types of thoughts, though. This is simply an observation: > Don’t @ me I’m not trying to start a controversy. I’m only stating an observation. https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1001189524477743105 https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1001189524477743105 React, like jQuery, could have done more to keep people from writing bad code. With React, they made the same mistake that Angular did, which was to impose strict rules on all developers. Vue, to its credit, doesn't make this mistake. It's much less opinionated about state management.
- joesb 8y ago
  They should done more to keep people from writing bad code, they should have less rule. What does that even mean?
  - benatkin 8y ago
    In this case, doing more means responding to the real-world usage of React, and making it so that lifting state up isn't the only recommended option. Vue did this and is grabbing some market share from React. https://reactjs.org/docs/lifting-state-up.html https://reactjs.org/docs/lifting-state-up.html
- freedomben 8y ago
  > This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader. I don't disagree but will push back slightly on the appeal to authority. I think in JS land we're getting a little too carried away with celebrity developers (I often joke about "what would Dan Abramov say?" and it's only half-joke). I've been trying hard to focus on the ideas, without regard from who said it.
danShumway 8y ago
I agree with the spirit of what he's saying, although I don't think jQuery is a very good comparison to use. React is a decision. I'm speaking in broad generalizations because I don't know how to put this principle into more specific terms, but good programmers should avoid making decisions for as long as possible. This is the same reason why I caution people against using test frameworks. Most of the time when you start coding an application you won't have enough information to make any educated decisions about it. This is a huge advantage that Vue has over React. You can use Vue for just one component out of your entire app and it's fine. It is fairly easy to separate it from all of the rest of your application logic and that means by extension it's fairly easy to rip it out later. Or at least... easy enough. It's still not perfect. I dislike how hard it is to make its templates fail gracefully when Javascript is disabled. I dislike that it uses setters in its data model, which discourages immutable programming. I dislike a few other things as well. At some point, someone will make a better framework than Vue, probably by building something even smaller and even more focused than Vue already is. But in the meantime, if you are going to use a framework for two-way data bindings, you should probably be using Vue instead of React. Opinion me, of course.
andrewstuart 8y ago
I don't buy it. ReactJS is a power tool and it takes some learning. If your primary concern is about your initial learning curve then you should look elsewhere such as VueJS but I'm glad of the power of ReactJS. Changing class to className is not a big deal, nor are the minor other bits and pieces mentioned in the post.
JohnCrane 8y ago
clueless dolt.
handbanana 8y ago
I don’t really agree for various reasons. That said, I’m not a huge fan of react, but am stuck working with a few code bases that use it. I prefer vue, but I dislike that it’s essentially a one man show.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  Vue isn’t a one man show. It has a sizable team behind it.
  - jexah 8y ago
    > essentially And when compared to React, he's absolutely right.
jaequery 8y ago
vue seem to be an evolution of react and angular. it is as if some react developer sat down and said, “how can we make this even simpler so that even my grandson can do it.” i appreciate when we have guys like the authors of Vue come forward driving the community and taking web development to the next level giving us a more elegant solution.
- tracker1 8y ago
  More like a cousin... I see Vue as a nice component system for smaller applications, I don't think I'd want to build anything of even moderate complexity with it. React is for building applications, especially with teams. Combined with redux and a handful of other pieces, it's very nice. Angular, I don't get why anyone would choose it today (I've said it time and again).
  - jaequery 8y ago
    I disagree. I would imo recommend you to switch to Vue if your app have gotten too big with React. As I said, Vue is more elegant and it improves the speed of development which also means less errors. There are many big companies and startups who switched to Vue and loving it so I would say your point is moot.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Facebook is probably the single most interactive and complex application out there... it's using React. There's also more to it than just the UI portion... there's also state management, and the unidirectional workflow, that you don't get in nearly as consistent a way with Vue as say Redux. Startups will use whatever is trendy. I'm unaware of any site the size of Walmart.com or twitter's mobile site, or Facebook that uses Vue. Just because you disagree does not invalidate my point.
twfarland 8y ago
This is from the guy who posted recently about struggling to learn React.
wolfspider 8y ago
I think there is some confusion comparing jquery with frameworks in general heh- time for a history lesson! So back in the mid-aughts right before jquery there was prototype. I got hired into a job where I had to maintain sites written with both in the past and they were very similar to each other. Ajax was new and so was the class based handling of JS to make it more object oriented. It could be done but prototype made it convenient. It was possible to manipulate objects before applying them to the DOM however it was really verbose...academic I would call it. Then prototype’s cool younger brother arrives (jquery) and it became so easy to pull this stuff off it was like a giant party. Learn jquery? Your hired! Ahh the halcyon days ;) Anyhow- if you’ve lived through things like CGI and DHTML (and java servlets to a lesser extent) they were like the malaise era of web dev but jquery flipped the tables there has been NOTHING like it to date. We’ve gone back to academic with colorful packaging (I’m lookin at you angular!) and react coupled with redux just isn’t the same- it’s interesting but not a quick study. So..back then we could pick up a program in 24 hrs book and land a job. Today we can read 24 books and scratch the surface. Jquery was a movement not a framework and the statement being made was life is too short to NOT be incredible, we can all be incredible with jquery so why not? More comparable to the Misfits showing up to a Johnny Cash show than just another framework...just my two cents.
- digitalzombie 8y ago
  There were also mootools and dojo. I was more into those two but jQuery made everything dead simple.
  - jiggliemon 8y ago
    Mootools was great! They took what was good about mootools and built that into React. A lot of the mootools team moved into React. At least the ones I was familiar with.
  - jaequery 8y ago
    and dont forget scriptaculous :)
    - 8y ago
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swyx 8y ago
i just find it amusing that everyone gets up in arms what Brad Frost struggles with in React because he's famous. news flash: hundreds of devs face these issues every day and figure it out. Brad is famous and has problems with React; that's fine. He'll figure out a way that works for him. Doesn't mean his opinion at all reflects the experience of the thousands of devs who are happy with React. Let's move on and talk about more interesting things.
huy-nguyen 8y ago
I think people got carried away with the JSX side of React (which IMO is really just the icing on the cake) and forgot that React was probably the first view library that introduces the notion of the DOM as a pure function of data. It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development. This purity makes UI extremely easy to reason about and makes all DOM changes tractable. I was in a Backbone shop before using React and I remember Backbone was such a chore to manage in a large application. We switched to React and never looked back.
- freedomben 8y ago
  > It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development. I totally agree, and in fact I would take it a little farther and say it's making functional programming mainstream on the backend as well. Many people I've worked with got their taste via React/Redux and then started adopting things like Elixir/Phoenix for the backend. Maybe it's an overstatement, but I credit React with driving at least some of that.
- pests 8y ago
  Its funny because JSX is totally unrelated to React besides just being a heavy convention. You can use a totally different template system if you plumb it up correctly. Plus JSX can be used outside of React. You hit on the two points that makes React what it is. A pure state -> ui abstraction and the ability for large projects or teams to use it efficiently.
pankajdoharey 8y ago
The JS world is so much more hype driven than say ruby, every few months they will have a new framework that promises to solve all the problems in ui land or the backend. They write songs in its praise everyone worships it like this is the one true framework a panacea for all evils. And then when the hype cycle winds down a new framework emerges. I am totally bored of looking at this cycle for the past few yrs. This just leaves a ton of unmaintainable projects in its tracks because the devs have found a new toy to play with. I have seen clients struggle to find backbone devs because no body in interested in Backbone this is a repeated pattern among JS Devs. JQuery -> Backbone -> [Tons of Backbone wannabe's written in Coffeescript Batmanjs/Bananajs/what not..] -> Angular -> [Angular lookalikes with tons of magic] -> Ember -> Meteor -> React -> Vue -> [Wait a few months new framework in the Pipeline]. Unfortunately very few want to agree to the truth.
- joelhooks 8y ago
  This just isn’t true. React has been going strong for 4 years with no sign of slowing down.
  - pankajdoharey 8y ago
    I dont disagree, React has some solid underpinnings but for now VUE has some momentum, till the next one comes along. Google gave up on the idea long back. Google develops Angular but doesnt use it in any of their core products. They themselves use Google Closure library for gmail or word processor.
    - anthonybullard 8y ago
      Actually the product that makes Google the vast majority of it's money is written in the Dart variety of Angular(AdWords) Reference: https://youtu.be/-HUHRRYQl5k?t=2m4s https://youtu.be/-HUHRRYQl5k?t=2m4s
    - jexah 8y ago
      Isn't the new YouTube website running Angular? Please don't shoot me if I'm wrong, I don't have any citations, I just presumed (on phone, too lazy to look up).
nielsbot 8y ago
Sort of tangential, but React is way less painful with TypeScript/tsx. I combine that with an IntelliJ IDE (RubyMine specifically) and honestly, it's a lot of fun to write web apps this way. (Maybe that's because I come from an iOS background?) Anyway, I recommend giving this setup a go.
- huy-nguyen 8y ago
  My first foray into React was done using Typesctipt. The functional nature of React plays very very with the static typing of TypeScript.
phragg 8y ago
Brad Frost makes most of his money telling people what they should do instead of actually _doing_ himself. He's given hundreds of talks all over the world about a component-based approach to style guides in web, but yet cannot fathom the need for React.
fapjacks 8y ago
I like to shit on jQuery like anybody else, but it did have its place in the world. It was totally abused by people, but that doesn't make jQuery bad per se, any more than PHP or JavaScript is bad. Yes, I avoided using those things as much as I could, and I much prefer other tools, but they are tools nonetheless. Bad programmers and nontechnical people posing as programmers can abuse well-loved and efficient tools, too. Have you ever seen code written by a noob embedded "engineer" who decided to write their weekend side project in Golang? It's as much a fucking disaster as any of the bad PHP or jQuery stuff out there.
itsangaris 8y ago
Ok, so Brad is already making sweeping declarations about React, yet less than a month ago he specifically posted about his struggle to learn it: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/my-struggle-to-learn-react/ http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/my-struggle-to-learn-react/ cool...
- _betty_ 8y ago
  Almost like some people don't quite get that's its intended to be used for complex applications rather than just websites.
- ggregoire 8y ago
  > hey there! I'm Brad Frost, a web designer Well, of course he will struggle to learn React. Web design and software engineering are two different fields… Not saying he needs a master in CS to learn React, but he will surely need to learn a bit of programming and JavaScript before jumping on it.
Achshar 8y ago
I find myself defending myself a lot these days here. I use vanilla js. Never had any trouble, I literally have no bundle, no dependencies, the amount of code I have to write is basically the same either way, no trouble syncing state with DOM either. Have done so in two moderate projects (40k, 15k). Everyone I meet looks at me like I'm crazy. But in the same breadth say the site feels so smooth and responsive. No shit. Catch being you he to learn how to write js but that's true for any framework as well. And frameworks have smaller shelf life anyways.
- medhir 8y ago
  Do you have any advice for developing this way? I've found myself too sticking in the VanillaJS camp, but not being able to talk about React seems to dissuade potential employers.
  - Achshar 8y ago
    My only advice would be to stay consistent, find patterns and genralize stuff. I do see the irony of making a framework of my own in the process of doing all that. I just embrace that. Everything is exactly how we want it and we know each line that executes on the machine. Makes development a breeze. There is nothing that react can do that vanilla js can't with reasonably same amount of effort. But stay open-minded. What helped me was that I worked with angular first to see how not to do front end (angular.js). I also regularly check out how react, angular, Vue, etc handle the same problems that I have. That usually gives an inspiration. In the end it's hard to believe how fast JavaScript can be even on smaller devices.
    - bigmanwalter 8y ago
      I agree with you and I do most of my stuff in vanilla JS these days, but if I have a complex UI state it can be nice to have a DOM diffing library rather than tracking and editing nodes explicitly. Mithril is, in my opinion, React done right. The entire framework is contained in four methods. It doesn't have any awkward leaky abstractions like Angular, and it is super light and responsive.
    - 8y ago
rbosinger 8y ago
As a member of a busy, small team with a Rails app and a jQuery heavy front-end... I agree. We use React in a few places and wanted to simply introduce it slowly and "convert to React where we could". It simply has not worked out for us. We have typical server side rendered HTML that has been progressively enhanced with sprinkles of JS (jQuery + various plugins). We do not and cannot book much developer time for refactoring and can only really improve the code itself in bits using the "boy scout rule" (leave the area you're working on better than you found it). For us, it turns out that yanking out chunks of jQuery and replacing them with React did not work out very well.
- pbowyer 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing, this is exactly what I am considering doing at the moment. Any thoughts on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17213264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17213264?
  - rbosinger 8y ago
    For us the difficulty is that with React you need to let React control it's piece of the DOM. We have lots of jQuery UI components. For example, we use Select2. So let's say a dev tries to redo a jQuery heavy form in React. It's mostly fine but there's a Select2 component in there and some WYSIWYG jQuery plugin on a text area. You can't just initialize those with the React component because React will complain about jQuery touching the DOM it controls. So now you either have to find React versions of those jQuery components or properly wrap the jQuery components you have with React which, IMO, can be a bit funky and ends up feeling kind of wrong. Basically, you can end up down a rabbit hole. If you're intention is to truly modernize you're JS and your happy to rip out old jQuery plugins and make changes like that then it's fine. We just didn't have the dev budget to always be doing that.
basejumping 8y ago
This guy is such a phony.
djsumdog 8y ago
I really like the linked Vue/Jquery article in the story as well. I've built some stuff in Vue and I really like it. It can be incredibly simple. I'm not a huge fan of React. I'm really not a fan of any site that requires Javascript to view. If it's a new article and I get a blank page, I immediately stick it in archive.is. I'm not turning on Javascript for your site just to view content. Fuck that. Fix your site to not suck shit. I realize you can easily get into the same thing with Vue .. and I think Vue, React and others, makes sense if you're actually running a web application. Your main page, login page and other content pages should be static, no Javascript required. If you have a new site or a blog or graphics, why the hell are you requiring React/Vue/Angular or some other framework? Just display the content. I haven't really looked into server-side rendering, but I suspect that still requires Javascript to be enabled on the client? Are there any newer Vue/React style front-end frameworks that are designed to still degrade gracefully without Javascript? (I suppose you can't really do this without pairing it with the backend language on the server). I really like how Hackernews still supports a Javascript-less system, even for things like up/down votes (although I still turn JS on for HN to avoid page refreshes).
- UlisesAC4 8y ago
  When javascript Is disabled you just loose the pwa features, pages are full loaded as html. For SSR you are sending the HTML text instead of JSON. Time ago you needed nodejs for SSR I do not know the alternatives today.
- tracker1 8y ago
  React can definitely use Server-side rendering... but it's often used for pre-render caching, and even doughnut caching to bootstrap the full application on the client, so you see content sooner. But, it's entirely possible to pre-render and degrade gracefully. Is it worth the effort for a fraction of a percent of technical users whining about the need for JS? probably not.
xab9 8y ago
The microwave oven is the new swiss army knife.
TekMol 8y ago
When I see this: var formname = $(this).find('.formname'); formname.empty(); formname.append(n_input); I think why not just use plain Javascript and do this: document.querySelector('.formname').innerHTML=n_input; Coders that are attached to libraries and frameworks always seem so afraid to use the tech already available. That they don't even look at how the basic solution would look like.
- Too 8y ago
  Today yes. Good luck with that back in the Internet Explorer 6 days. Cross browser compatibility is what motivated jquery in the first place, today it has played out its role as a cross browser DOM manipulation library. Modern libraries such as React and Vue however play a totally different role. They introduce proper architecture to web development such as separating the view from your business logic with data binding, they can not be compared with jquery which was just a nicer way of doing the same old manual DOM manipulation.
- deleted 8y ago
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- chx 8y ago
  Real life example: https://caniuse.com/#feat=urlsearchparams https://caniuse.com/#feat=urlsearchparams if you need to support IE11 then you can't use the URLSearchParams object. Your best bet is still a jQuery library.
- m90 8y ago
  Sorry for being terribly pedantic, but the "vanilla" version just does not do what the jQuery code does: - `this` might not be document - find might return multiple elements, not just one - if nothing matches, jQuery does not throw unlike the vanilla version I do understand it's just an example, but if you'd consider all the implicit cases the jQuery example covers, you'd end up with a lot more than a single line. I see your point, but using off examples like this don't really sell it too well.
  - TekMol 8y ago
stevebmark 8y ago
A common flaw in software engineers is writing thinkpieces about technology they don't fully understand yet. Giving it a clickbait, not fully baked title is a bonus. Move along. Engineers will continue to use good technology they understand (like React) while newcomers will continue to try to emotionally justify technologies they don't want to learn and use.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
jQuery in terms of popularity? I'd take it as a compliment.
bigbadgoose 8y ago
> I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. it's about workforce and durability of the platform
simion314 8y ago
Does React or other cool frameworks have alternatives to jQuery UI components or you need to build your own calendars,dropdowns, accordions.
- ggregoire 8y ago
  React has everything (calendars, dropdowns, accordions and so on).
  - simion314 8y ago
    Can you link to the official repository? last time I checked you had to find something on github that mostly were incomplete and the best components were jQuery wrappers
invaliduser 8y ago
JQuery is a great tool, it got a lot of buzz and people started to abusively use it out of its nominal scope. This does not say anything about jquery, only about people. React is having a lot of buzz, and the same abuses happen in places where it is nowhere needed. Same cause, same symptoms. You can replace jquery/react with any technology or concept, OO programming, functional programming, MVC, blockchain, machine learning, and every technology or concept having its momentum is or will be misused in some way at some point. This happened, is happening, and will always happen.
i_am_stupid 8y ago
I am learning to code and a newbe. I think jQuery != react. I do not understand, why experienced people like to compare jQuery with react when both the lib have different goal ? And show that jQuery is bad. React can be used with jQuery for DOM manipulation. Described in react doc (https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.html#integrating-with-jquery-chosen-plugin https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.ht...). Shall I learn jQuery at all ? Please, guide me.
- Axnyff 8y ago
  The comparison Sara made was that React can be overused just as jQuery was. The problems with jQuery is that it's mostly a set of functions to simplify Ajax and DOM manipulation so it's not really helpful for the structure of an application. React (and other frameworks surch as Angular, Ember and Vue), on the other hand, helps you to build reusable component which helps a lot to scale. Also jQuery's golden age was when browser compatibility was a big issue, nowaday, most browsers behave properly. There's no harm in learning jQuery, its interface is way more intuitive than native DOM apis. It could be a good idea to try and build a simple app with jQuery and see what are the pain points and then compare with a modern framework.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    My only advice to people today would be to use one of the much smaller jquery-like libraries for DOM interaction/events and fetch (shimming ie11) instead of other wrappers.
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kaixi 8y ago
That's an incredible compliment.
nreece 8y ago
Nitpicks aside, it seems to me that React/Vue are only/mainly useful for two-way data binding. If it's just one-way binding (i.e. JSON to template), then jQuery with something like Handlebars will be just fine. Correct me if I've misunderstood.
- pygy_ 8y ago
  React and Vue are immediate mode/declarative UI libs. Your code says "given the model/state, here's what I'd like the UI to look like right now", and they manage to mutate the DOM efficiently to achieve what you want. jQuery and the plain DOM are retained mode APIs. You manipulate stateful objects to achieve your goals. It is ok for simple interactions, but it quickly becomes unmanageable for more complex apps.
Cub3 8y ago
Since early in my career when hiring I've found developers who only know 'jQuery / Angular / Vue / React' but not the underlying Javascript, I swear "x is the new y" is said every time a new framework gets 6 months into vogue.
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >Since early in my career when hiring I've found developers who only know 'jQuery / Angular / Vue / React' but not the underlying Javascript It's frightening, the degree to which many professional web app developers do not know the fundamentals of Javascript. Our technical interview starts out with ridiculously simple questions and gets progressively more difficult and esoteric. And a dismayingly high number of candidates don't get past the first couple of questions. And these are people with years of experience and at least some of the hot JS frameworks on their resume.
faitswulff 8y ago
Mods, can we change the title? The current title was clearly chosen to be inflammatory. Meanwhile, the original title only mentions VueJS, not React: "Replacing jQuery With Vue.js: No Build Step Necessary"
tracker1 8y ago
Vue is for enhancing web pages.. you can do applications, but they get very complex beyond small-mid sized apps. React is made for building web-based applications. You can do small stuff with it, but it's often overkill. Just because you can use a butter knife to turn a flathead screw, doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job. These days I might reach for Vue as a jQuery stand-in, but more likely, I'd use a smaller jQuery-like library, or just use straight vanilla JS, or other micro libraries. For anything big enough to deserve a build process React is absolutely my first choice.
- nek4life 8y ago
  Vue can be used to enhance web pages, but it works equally well if you want to build a large application. This was one of the design goals. Something that you can start small and scale up with that works equally well for both. If you use the Vue CLI you can have a setup with a router and build tools and setup something very similar to create react app.
yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
Brad Frost has significant social capital and influence. That's the only reason this charlatanry is given the time of day.
nobleach 8y ago
The problem was never jQuery. jQuery performed a very necessary function when it was created. It was always the intention of the lib to cease to be needed over time. The problem was/is the ecosystem created around jQuery. Want to do a thing? Do it with jQuery. Want to read a cookie? Use jQuery. Want an image carousel? Build it with jQuery. Want to do anything at all? jQuery. I do see something similar happening with our more junior devs. Their Google searches have now turned to "how do I read a cookie with React?"... and sure enough, there is a react-cookie lib - which may or may not be useful for their task... but since it says "react", it'll probably show up in a pull request. React can't be blamed for this though. All the ecosystem being built with the expectation of "well everyone's using React", _is_ a problem. Education about separation of concerns is the only solution I can see.
dmitri1981 8y ago
I wanted to try and address the points Brad makes and as well as clear up some of the misunderstandings in his post. Take a look https://medium.com/@dmitrigrabov/react-is-not-the-new-jquery-e42a19f165f4 https://medium.com/@dmitrigrabov/react-is-not-the-new-jquery...
sireat 8y ago
Coming from a background of doing embedded Javascript work(not web) I found React surprisingly easy to work with and joy to write code in. React feels like writing normal Javascript. Vue is very easy to embed into existing web page but feels like learning a new DSL instead of regular Javascript.
mikl 8y ago
> React is a big commitment. I guess that’s why I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. There’s nothing proprietary about React. It’s all open source. MIT licensed. If you don’t like Facebook’s implementation, there’s like a dozen re-implementations. Hell, a modestly competent software developer could write his own implementation of React in a few days of work. All else being equal, I’d say a React code base will be less of a maintenance hassle in the future, than the spaghetti mess you usually get when trying to write complex applications with jQuery (been there, done that).

Let’s not forget that jQuery was a polyfill that allowed JavaScript Devs on all browsers to code to a common baseline. React is a nice —- and popular —- library for building UIs but it’s existence isn’t an indictment of the laziness of standards implementors for browsers (okay, IE mainly) and god-send to developers like jQuery was.

growtofill 8y ago
Yes, React isn’t _exactly_ jQuery, but it gives the same level of productivity boost comparing to development with just the modern DOM APIs (querySelector, classList, etc).
- crooked-v 8y ago
  For a large project, React gives you way, way, way more benefits than jQuery does.

rich-and-poor 8y ago

Oh Brad, you do not know what you are talking about right off the bat. Let's go through your list. 1. Every document has a root node. <div id='app' /> is your root node now. You had a root node before, you have a root node now. 2. Do a search and replace. That's easy. 3. That's another search and replace. 4. You don't need to call a constructor, you don't need to use bind, and you don't need to assign your functions to an variable on your class instance. React allows you to compose things. Make something once and use it everywhere. You write much, much less code. You get lifecycle hooks for when things mount, update, unmount. You get easy templating in JSX. You can also ditch the whole thing for Inferno if you care about having no lisence or company behind it. You also get amazing libraries for state management and async via reactivex.

steve_adams_86 8y ago
You also get convention. jQuery didn't offer much of that once you started gluing its functions together... I can usually jump into someone's react code and get what's going on pretty quickly unless they did something really gnarly with incredibly nested props. Even then, at least I still know where to drill down. With jQuery soup, you didn't get that luxury. Being able to have an entire team know how to build components and provide them with functionality is an incredible advantage. I don't love everything about react either, but the ecosystem, somewhat enforced convention, tooling, etc - it's worth it (so far). I love some things about Vue, but it isn't a silver bullet either. Brad seems to be pretty butt hurt about react. If you've worked on a large team without something like react, then worked on one with react, it really shines. It's a major productivity booster. It's not perfect, but it's very good.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  jQuery had a lot of convention, for both it and it's plugins. jQuery + co. have very consistent "look and feel"
  - girvo 8y ago
    I agree when you’re talking about the most well known of plugins and so on, but IME for application code all that goes out the window. A lot of developers really didn’t know how to write JavaScript back then. Still don’t, but we didn’t then either ;)
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  - steve_adams_86 8y ago
    I agree that the library has great convention. I actually learned quite a bit from that API when I was starting out. The only problem was you could really abuse the usage of the API. I'm realizing now that this isn't a fair comparison. React 'wins' here largely because it has a smaller scope. It's for giving functionality to templates built in the library using a certain approach. jQuery was far more open ended and far less opinionated. That was as much it's strength as it's weakness. It's definitely not a direct comparison. But I do think react is a nice safe tool for larger teams.

mpc 8y ago

We're talking about two totally different programming paradigms here. The end product might be the same but it's more of a question about how you arrive there. With JQuery you're signing up for manual DOM manipulation. It's a challenge to scale that for what's now considered table-stakes for web apps.

statictype 8y ago

If you tear out something like jQuery, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get those accordions to expand and collapse again. If you tear out React, you get a blank page. React is a big commitment. This is probably the only real concern I see. jQuery is a library for DOM manipulation. It can co-exist with many other libraries. React is an entire framework. These days you need jquery less because browsers are more standards compliant and css animations basically work. The trick is about using the right tool for the right job. We have several large react applications - these are user-interaction heavy rich single page apps. But we also use vanilla html and jquery dom manipulations in many other places.

threatofrain 8y ago
What does "an entire framework" mean? Because you can just make React the little news and weather widget in the corner of your app / website, as the only React component. Same with Vue. The people for whom ripping out React or Vue leads to a blank page are those who wanted an app from the ground-up. If anything, React is losing because it doesn't include enough out of the box. If you wanted to build a news widget, fine. But if you wanted to build an app, you have to start putting pieces together from 3rd parties (or write your own custom pieces). That's not what a framework sounds like to me, that sounds like figure-out-your-own-framework, and I think that's why Vue is winning. Create React App was a very late response, and I still don't think it's as good as Vue's up-and-going tooling experience.
- statictype 8y ago
  I guess what I meant was when you build a widget with react - the whole widget has to be react. With jQuery, you're likely building it with html and using jQuery for user interactions or animations (I know - not always true - constructing the markup with $('<tag>') is also useful). So its easier to rip out jQuery and replace it with - say - document.querySelector - or whatnot. I personally think React is overkill if you're pulling it in to do a small widget on a larger non-react page
- joe_momma 8y ago
  That's because you aren't using Reason-React

nol13 8y ago

<3 jQuery, maybe nostalgia talking but still one of my favorite pieces of software ever. Made DOM manipulation fun.

meesterdude 8y ago
> Made DOM manipulation fun. same! Jquery is still quite useful and powerful. This is also what rails does for me; makes web development fun. Or highcharts making charts fun, or elasticsearch making search fun. To me that's a testament to elegantly solving a problem. I just don't get those fuzzies with react.

gcommer 8y ago

> Burn all of your markup down to the ground and replace what you had with <div id="app" /> This isn't totally true -- if you really only wanted to implement a single toggle and leave the rest of the page alone, then you could replace just the relevant DOM elements with a container and render into that fragment of the page. (Though really I'd ask why use React if that's the only value you're getting out of it) > I guess that’s why I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. [...] Projects like Vue are showing that’s not necessary. Except, Vue.js does require a proprietary format; all those v-* attributes and custom components will be need to be migrated if you want to switch away from Vue. Comparatively, React is better in this regard because there are multiple implementations of React (preact, inferno, nerv). Also, JSX is technically optional, and it's really easy to mix markdown, or other formats/templating engines into a React app to handle the content-heavy bits.

freedomben 8y ago
I feel like the word "proprietary" means something different to me than the author. When I think of proprietary I think of a closed standard that may or may not be copyrighted/patented. Something like React would not even come close to my definition. Wikipedia seems to agree with me [1], but maybe I'm misinterpreting it: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

superfrank 8y ago

> React is the new jQuery Anyone who uses "the new jQuery" as some sort of insult (as it seems Sara did in her tweet) probably hasn't been a developer for more than a few years or is just trying to sound smarter than they are by bashing an easy target. The reason jQuery got so popular is that it made common tasks so much easier than anything else at the time. Anyone who was doing web development before jQuery knows what a godsend it was at the time. JQuery was a fantastic leap forward for development at the time it was released. JQuery didn't become bad, the rest of the development world caught up and made it unnecessary.

danShumway 8y ago
I don't think JQuery ever got bad. It just got unnecessary, like you said. But it took a lot of work to convince people that it was unnecessary. A charitable explanation of Sara's tweet might be that, like with jQuery, it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project. The other comparative downside of JQuery was that components started to rely on it as a shared library, which meant developers suddenly needed to do dependency management. That is (usually) a bad idea. React absolutely does have that problem as well - probably to an even worse degree than jQuery widgets ever did. This is kind of the same concern I have with Vue to be honest. I use Vue for prototyping and will probably use it in some final apps as well. But I'm probably not ever going to use a component that someone else has written if it relies on Vue. IMO Lodash went the right direction with this. A component or library can depend on Lodash, pull in just the functions that they use for a final build, and then nobody else in the entire dev toolchain needs to know or care. No risk of conflicting dependencies, build size stays low, etc... I kind of wonder if the problems Vue solves for me could be solved better by a smaller, lodash-style library instead of a framework.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Being used to jQuery, I really see no reason not to use it in new projects. I could learn all the new native equivalents, and even then still ending up doing more work than if I'd been using jQuery, just to save a little bit of page load time and filesize, but it would almost certainly not be worth it.

joe_momma 8y ago

Just skip React and Vue and go straight to ReasonML/React, you will end up there in 3 years anyway

chrisco255 8y ago
Had that worked well for you? Is it mature enough to use today?

sheeshkebab 8y ago

React has a lot of inertia behind it, although it doesn’t really make things easier. The amount of js code to make even basic things work is high, and with so many different styles of writing react/js code, large codebases require significant effort to keep maintainable. Which is to say, with this much effort put into structuring maintainable react js code, one could pretty much develop in any js ui framework (including jquery, backbone or none whatsoever) - since little of this effort is dependent on react, or made easier by it.

lilactown 8y ago
I disagree. Bridging the concerns split between between HTML, JS and CSS helps a ton and would be a lot of code to write if not for React (or similar frameworks).
- pests 8y ago
  I feel this is because many people confuse Redux (or flux) with React itself. Or the more general problem of not knowing the difference between store state, local component state, and component instance state (the actual JS object's properties.) The new Unstated library leveraging the next Context API is a nice balance I find for state management. It basically just mirrors Reacts setState style update system. Although you do lose the single source of truth pro of Redux.
joesb 8y ago
Virtual DOM and ability to derived your DOM state from props and state is not something you can easily done with jQuery or any UI library that doesn't have that concept. It's not something you can easily implement yourself either. That's the main part that makes React code maintainable.
- quxbar 8y ago
  I agree, this is the part that people seem to be ignoring. Yes, you can make a proof of computational equivalence between jQuery and React, but you cannot deny the massive increase in human usability that an set of components brings. There's far more interesting set of things you can do, Redux + the litany of other related libraries, a vibrant ecosystem unto themselves, prove this. I started my career out slinging jQuery and after 4 years of React I never want to go back.

danielrhodes 8y ago

Moved from Vue to React. A couple things drove this: Typescript support for Vue was kind of weak, and the interception of events and reactive elements ended up creating more bugs. I do love how Vue is easy to get up and going fast, but React seems more compatible with a growing team where you want stronger guarantees.

johnny22 8y ago
i hope their switch to managing reactivity via Proxy solves stuff like this.
jpkeisala 8y ago
First time I read someone moving from Vue to React. I thought trend was only from React/Angular to Vue?
- tracker1 8y ago
  Vue works better for small apps, or progressive enhancement (similar to jQuery) React works better for teams working on applications that need build tooling and dependency management anyway. Angular, frankly I don't see why anyone would pick it over the other two. Yeah, it's got more in the box, but that bigger box takes 4x as much effort to lift off the ground.

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benatkin 8y ago

This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader. There are different types of thoughts, though. This is simply an observation: > Don’t @ me I’m not trying to start a controversy. I’m only stating an observation. https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1001189524477743105 https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1001189524477743105 React, like jQuery, could have done more to keep people from writing bad code. With React, they made the same mistake that Angular did, which was to impose strict rules on all developers. Vue, to its credit, doesn't make this mistake. It's much less opinionated about state management.

joesb 8y ago
They should done more to keep people from writing bad code, they should have less rule. What does that even mean?
- benatkin 8y ago
  In this case, doing more means responding to the real-world usage of React, and making it so that lifting state up isn't the only recommended option. Vue did this and is grabbing some market share from React. https://reactjs.org/docs/lifting-state-up.html https://reactjs.org/docs/lifting-state-up.html
freedomben 8y ago
> This comes from a well-known and respected thought leader. I don't disagree but will push back slightly on the appeal to authority. I think in JS land we're getting a little too carried away with celebrity developers (I often joke about "what would Dan Abramov say?" and it's only half-joke). I've been trying hard to focus on the ideas, without regard from who said it.

danShumway 8y ago

I agree with the spirit of what he's saying, although I don't think jQuery is a very good comparison to use. React is a decision. I'm speaking in broad generalizations because I don't know how to put this principle into more specific terms, but good programmers should avoid making decisions for as long as possible. This is the same reason why I caution people against using test frameworks. Most of the time when you start coding an application you won't have enough information to make any educated decisions about it. This is a huge advantage that Vue has over React. You can use Vue for just one component out of your entire app and it's fine. It is fairly easy to separate it from all of the rest of your application logic and that means by extension it's fairly easy to rip it out later. Or at least... easy enough. It's still not perfect. I dislike how hard it is to make its templates fail gracefully when Javascript is disabled. I dislike that it uses setters in its data model, which discourages immutable programming. I dislike a few other things as well. At some point, someone will make a better framework than Vue, probably by building something even smaller and even more focused than Vue already is. But in the meantime, if you are going to use a framework for two-way data bindings, you should probably be using Vue instead of React. Opinion me, of course.

andrewstuart 8y ago

I don't buy it. ReactJS is a power tool and it takes some learning. If your primary concern is about your initial learning curve then you should look elsewhere such as VueJS but I'm glad of the power of ReactJS. Changing class to className is not a big deal, nor are the minor other bits and pieces mentioned in the post.

JohnCrane 8y ago

clueless dolt.

handbanana 8y ago

I don’t really agree for various reasons. That said, I’m not a huge fan of react, but am stuck working with a few code bases that use it. I prefer vue, but I dislike that it’s essentially a one man show.

enraged_camel 8y ago
Vue isn’t a one man show. It has a sizable team behind it.
- jexah 8y ago
  > essentially And when compared to React, he's absolutely right.

jaequery 8y ago

vue seem to be an evolution of react and angular. it is as if some react developer sat down and said, “how can we make this even simpler so that even my grandson can do it.” i appreciate when we have guys like the authors of Vue come forward driving the community and taking web development to the next level giving us a more elegant solution.

tracker1 8y ago
More like a cousin... I see Vue as a nice component system for smaller applications, I don't think I'd want to build anything of even moderate complexity with it. React is for building applications, especially with teams. Combined with redux and a handful of other pieces, it's very nice. Angular, I don't get why anyone would choose it today (I've said it time and again).
- jaequery 8y ago
  I disagree. I would imo recommend you to switch to Vue if your app have gotten too big with React. As I said, Vue is more elegant and it improves the speed of development which also means less errors. There are many big companies and startups who switched to Vue and loving it so I would say your point is moot.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Facebook is probably the single most interactive and complex application out there... it's using React. There's also more to it than just the UI portion... there's also state management, and the unidirectional workflow, that you don't get in nearly as consistent a way with Vue as say Redux. Startups will use whatever is trendy. I'm unaware of any site the size of Walmart.com or twitter's mobile site, or Facebook that uses Vue. Just because you disagree does not invalidate my point.

twfarland 8y ago

This is from the guy who posted recently about struggling to learn React.

wolfspider 8y ago

I think there is some confusion comparing jquery with frameworks in general heh- time for a history lesson! So back in the mid-aughts right before jquery there was prototype. I got hired into a job where I had to maintain sites written with both in the past and they were very similar to each other. Ajax was new and so was the class based handling of JS to make it more object oriented. It could be done but prototype made it convenient. It was possible to manipulate objects before applying them to the DOM however it was really verbose...academic I would call it. Then prototype’s cool younger brother arrives (jquery) and it became so easy to pull this stuff off it was like a giant party. Learn jquery? Your hired! Ahh the halcyon days ;) Anyhow- if you’ve lived through things like CGI and DHTML (and java servlets to a lesser extent) they were like the malaise era of web dev but jquery flipped the tables there has been NOTHING like it to date. We’ve gone back to academic with colorful packaging (I’m lookin at you angular!) and react coupled with redux just isn’t the same- it’s interesting but not a quick study. So..back then we could pick up a program in 24 hrs book and land a job. Today we can read 24 books and scratch the surface. Jquery was a movement not a framework and the statement being made was life is too short to NOT be incredible, we can all be incredible with jquery so why not? More comparable to the Misfits showing up to a Johnny Cash show than just another framework...just my two cents.

digitalzombie 8y ago
There were also mootools and dojo. I was more into those two but jQuery made everything dead simple.
- jiggliemon 8y ago
  Mootools was great! They took what was good about mootools and built that into React. A lot of the mootools team moved into React. At least the ones I was familiar with.
- jaequery 8y ago
  and dont forget scriptaculous :)
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swyx 8y ago

i just find it amusing that everyone gets up in arms what Brad Frost struggles with in React because he's famous. news flash: hundreds of devs face these issues every day and figure it out. Brad is famous and has problems with React; that's fine. He'll figure out a way that works for him. Doesn't mean his opinion at all reflects the experience of the thousands of devs who are happy with React. Let's move on and talk about more interesting things.

huy-nguyen 8y ago

I think people got carried away with the JSX side of React (which IMO is really just the icing on the cake) and forgot that React was probably the first view library that introduces the notion of the DOM as a pure function of data. It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development. This purity makes UI extremely easy to reason about and makes all DOM changes tractable. I was in a Backbone shop before using React and I remember Backbone was such a chore to manage in a large application. We switched to React and never looked back.

freedomben 8y ago
> It made functional programming mainstream in front-end development. I totally agree, and in fact I would take it a little farther and say it's making functional programming mainstream on the backend as well. Many people I've worked with got their taste via React/Redux and then started adopting things like Elixir/Phoenix for the backend. Maybe it's an overstatement, but I credit React with driving at least some of that.
pests 8y ago
Its funny because JSX is totally unrelated to React besides just being a heavy convention. You can use a totally different template system if you plumb it up correctly. Plus JSX can be used outside of React. You hit on the two points that makes React what it is. A pure state -> ui abstraction and the ability for large projects or teams to use it efficiently.

pankajdoharey 8y ago

The JS world is so much more hype driven than say ruby, every few months they will have a new framework that promises to solve all the problems in ui land or the backend. They write songs in its praise everyone worships it like this is the one true framework a panacea for all evils. And then when the hype cycle winds down a new framework emerges. I am totally bored of looking at this cycle for the past few yrs. This just leaves a ton of unmaintainable projects in its tracks because the devs have found a new toy to play with. I have seen clients struggle to find backbone devs because no body in interested in Backbone this is a repeated pattern among JS Devs. JQuery -> Backbone -> [Tons of Backbone wannabe's written in Coffeescript Batmanjs/Bananajs/what not..] -> Angular -> [Angular lookalikes with tons of magic] -> Ember -> Meteor -> React -> Vue -> [Wait a few months new framework in the Pipeline]. Unfortunately very few want to agree to the truth.

joelhooks 8y ago
This just isn’t true. React has been going strong for 4 years with no sign of slowing down.
- pankajdoharey 8y ago
  I dont disagree, React has some solid underpinnings but for now VUE has some momentum, till the next one comes along. Google gave up on the idea long back. Google develops Angular but doesnt use it in any of their core products. They themselves use Google Closure library for gmail or word processor.
  - anthonybullard 8y ago
    Actually the product that makes Google the vast majority of it's money is written in the Dart variety of Angular(AdWords) Reference: https://youtu.be/-HUHRRYQl5k?t=2m4s https://youtu.be/-HUHRRYQl5k?t=2m4s
  - jexah 8y ago
    Isn't the new YouTube website running Angular? Please don't shoot me if I'm wrong, I don't have any citations, I just presumed (on phone, too lazy to look up).

nielsbot 8y ago

Sort of tangential, but React is way less painful with TypeScript/tsx. I combine that with an IntelliJ IDE (RubyMine specifically) and honestly, it's a lot of fun to write web apps this way. (Maybe that's because I come from an iOS background?) Anyway, I recommend giving this setup a go.

huy-nguyen 8y ago
My first foray into React was done using Typesctipt. The functional nature of React plays very very with the static typing of TypeScript.

phragg 8y ago

Brad Frost makes most of his money telling people what they should do instead of actually _doing_ himself. He's given hundreds of talks all over the world about a component-based approach to style guides in web, but yet cannot fathom the need for React.

fapjacks 8y ago

I like to shit on jQuery like anybody else, but it did have its place in the world. It was totally abused by people, but that doesn't make jQuery bad per se, any more than PHP or JavaScript is bad. Yes, I avoided using those things as much as I could, and I much prefer other tools, but they are tools nonetheless. Bad programmers and nontechnical people posing as programmers can abuse well-loved and efficient tools, too. Have you ever seen code written by a noob embedded "engineer" who decided to write their weekend side project in Golang? It's as much a fucking disaster as any of the bad PHP or jQuery stuff out there.

itsangaris 8y ago

Ok, so Brad is already making sweeping declarations about React, yet less than a month ago he specifically posted about his struggle to learn it: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/my-struggle-to-learn-react/ http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/my-struggle-to-learn-react/ cool...

_betty_ 8y ago
Almost like some people don't quite get that's its intended to be used for complex applications rather than just websites.
ggregoire 8y ago
> hey there! I'm Brad Frost, a web designer Well, of course he will struggle to learn React. Web design and software engineering are two different fields… Not saying he needs a master in CS to learn React, but he will surely need to learn a bit of programming and JavaScript before jumping on it.

Achshar 8y ago

I find myself defending myself a lot these days here. I use vanilla js. Never had any trouble, I literally have no bundle, no dependencies, the amount of code I have to write is basically the same either way, no trouble syncing state with DOM either. Have done so in two moderate projects (40k, 15k). Everyone I meet looks at me like I'm crazy. But in the same breadth say the site feels so smooth and responsive. No shit. Catch being you he to learn how to write js but that's true for any framework as well. And frameworks have smaller shelf life anyways.

medhir 8y ago
Do you have any advice for developing this way? I've found myself too sticking in the VanillaJS camp, but not being able to talk about React seems to dissuade potential employers.
- Achshar 8y ago
  My only advice would be to stay consistent, find patterns and genralize stuff. I do see the irony of making a framework of my own in the process of doing all that. I just embrace that. Everything is exactly how we want it and we know each line that executes on the machine. Makes development a breeze. There is nothing that react can do that vanilla js can't with reasonably same amount of effort. But stay open-minded. What helped me was that I worked with angular first to see how not to do front end (angular.js). I also regularly check out how react, angular, Vue, etc handle the same problems that I have. That usually gives an inspiration. In the end it's hard to believe how fast JavaScript can be even on smaller devices.
  - bigmanwalter 8y ago
    I agree with you and I do most of my stuff in vanilla JS these days, but if I have a complex UI state it can be nice to have a DOM diffing library rather than tracking and editing nodes explicitly. Mithril is, in my opinion, React done right. The entire framework is contained in four methods. It doesn't have any awkward leaky abstractions like Angular, and it is super light and responsive.
  - 8y ago

rbosinger 8y ago

As a member of a busy, small team with a Rails app and a jQuery heavy front-end... I agree. We use React in a few places and wanted to simply introduce it slowly and "convert to React where we could". It simply has not worked out for us. We have typical server side rendered HTML that has been progressively enhanced with sprinkles of JS (jQuery + various plugins). We do not and cannot book much developer time for refactoring and can only really improve the code itself in bits using the "boy scout rule" (leave the area you're working on better than you found it). For us, it turns out that yanking out chunks of jQuery and replacing them with React did not work out very well.

pbowyer 8y ago
Thanks for sharing, this is exactly what I am considering doing at the moment. Any thoughts on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17213264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17213264?
- rbosinger 8y ago
  For us the difficulty is that with React you need to let React control it's piece of the DOM. We have lots of jQuery UI components. For example, we use Select2. So let's say a dev tries to redo a jQuery heavy form in React. It's mostly fine but there's a Select2 component in there and some WYSIWYG jQuery plugin on a text area. You can't just initialize those with the React component because React will complain about jQuery touching the DOM it controls. So now you either have to find React versions of those jQuery components or properly wrap the jQuery components you have with React which, IMO, can be a bit funky and ends up feeling kind of wrong. Basically, you can end up down a rabbit hole. If you're intention is to truly modernize you're JS and your happy to rip out old jQuery plugins and make changes like that then it's fine. We just didn't have the dev budget to always be doing that.

basejumping 8y ago

This guy is such a phony.

djsumdog 8y ago

I really like the linked Vue/Jquery article in the story as well. I've built some stuff in Vue and I really like it. It can be incredibly simple. I'm not a huge fan of React. I'm really not a fan of any site that requires Javascript to view. If it's a new article and I get a blank page, I immediately stick it in archive.is. I'm not turning on Javascript for your site just to view content. Fuck that. Fix your site to not suck shit. I realize you can easily get into the same thing with Vue .. and I think Vue, React and others, makes sense if you're actually running a web application. Your main page, login page and other content pages should be static, no Javascript required. If you have a new site or a blog or graphics, why the hell are you requiring React/Vue/Angular or some other framework? Just display the content. I haven't really looked into server-side rendering, but I suspect that still requires Javascript to be enabled on the client? Are there any newer Vue/React style front-end frameworks that are designed to still degrade gracefully without Javascript? (I suppose you can't really do this without pairing it with the backend language on the server). I really like how Hackernews still supports a Javascript-less system, even for things like up/down votes (although I still turn JS on for HN to avoid page refreshes).

UlisesAC4 8y ago
When javascript Is disabled you just loose the pwa features, pages are full loaded as html. For SSR you are sending the HTML text instead of JSON. Time ago you needed nodejs for SSR I do not know the alternatives today.
tracker1 8y ago
React can definitely use Server-side rendering... but it's often used for pre-render caching, and even doughnut caching to bootstrap the full application on the client, so you see content sooner. But, it's entirely possible to pre-render and degrade gracefully. Is it worth the effort for a fraction of a percent of technical users whining about the need for JS? probably not.

xab9 8y ago

The microwave oven is the new swiss army knife.

TekMol 8y ago

When I see this: var formname = $(this).find('.formname'); formname.empty(); formname.append(n_input); I think why not just use plain Javascript and do this: document.querySelector('.formname').innerHTML=n_input; Coders that are attached to libraries and frameworks always seem so afraid to use the tech already available. That they don't even look at how the basic solution would look like.

Too 8y ago
Today yes. Good luck with that back in the Internet Explorer 6 days. Cross browser compatibility is what motivated jquery in the first place, today it has played out its role as a cross browser DOM manipulation library. Modern libraries such as React and Vue however play a totally different role. They introduce proper architecture to web development such as separating the view from your business logic with data binding, they can not be compared with jquery which was just a nicer way of doing the same old manual DOM manipulation.
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chx 8y ago
Real life example: https://caniuse.com/#feat=urlsearchparams https://caniuse.com/#feat=urlsearchparams if you need to support IE11 then you can't use the URLSearchParams object. Your best bet is still a jQuery library.
m90 8y ago
Sorry for being terribly pedantic, but the "vanilla" version just does not do what the jQuery code does: - `this` might not be document - find might return multiple elements, not just one - if nothing matches, jQuery does not throw unlike the vanilla version I do understand it's just an example, but if you'd consider all the implicit cases the jQuery example covers, you'd end up with a lot more than a single line. I see your point, but using off examples like this don't really sell it too well.
- TekMol 8y ago

stevebmark 8y ago

A common flaw in software engineers is writing thinkpieces about technology they don't fully understand yet. Giving it a clickbait, not fully baked title is a bonus. Move along. Engineers will continue to use good technology they understand (like React) while newcomers will continue to try to emotionally justify technologies they don't want to learn and use.

oh-kumudo 8y ago

jQuery in terms of popularity? I'd take it as a compliment.

bigbadgoose 8y ago

> I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. it's about workforce and durability of the platform

simion314 8y ago

Does React or other cool frameworks have alternatives to jQuery UI components or you need to build your own calendars,dropdowns, accordions.

ggregoire 8y ago
React has everything (calendars, dropdowns, accordions and so on).
- simion314 8y ago
  Can you link to the official repository? last time I checked you had to find something on github that mostly were incomplete and the best components were jQuery wrappers

invaliduser 8y ago

JQuery is a great tool, it got a lot of buzz and people started to abusively use it out of its nominal scope. This does not say anything about jquery, only about people. React is having a lot of buzz, and the same abuses happen in places where it is nowhere needed. Same cause, same symptoms. You can replace jquery/react with any technology or concept, OO programming, functional programming, MVC, blockchain, machine learning, and every technology or concept having its momentum is or will be misused in some way at some point. This happened, is happening, and will always happen.

i_am_stupid 8y ago

I am learning to code and a newbe. I think jQuery != react. I do not understand, why experienced people like to compare jQuery with react when both the lib have different goal ? And show that jQuery is bad. React can be used with jQuery for DOM manipulation. Described in react doc (https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.html#integrating-with-jquery-chosen-plugin https://reactjs.org/docs/integrating-with-other-libraries.ht...). Shall I learn jQuery at all ? Please, guide me.

Axnyff 8y ago
The comparison Sara made was that React can be overused just as jQuery was. The problems with jQuery is that it's mostly a set of functions to simplify Ajax and DOM manipulation so it's not really helpful for the structure of an application. React (and other frameworks surch as Angular, Ember and Vue), on the other hand, helps you to build reusable component which helps a lot to scale. Also jQuery's golden age was when browser compatibility was a big issue, nowaday, most browsers behave properly. There's no harm in learning jQuery, its interface is way more intuitive than native DOM apis. It could be a good idea to try and build a simple app with jQuery and see what are the pain points and then compare with a modern framework.
- tracker1 8y ago
  My only advice to people today would be to use one of the much smaller jquery-like libraries for DOM interaction/events and fetch (shimming ie11) instead of other wrappers.

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kaixi 8y ago

That's an incredible compliment.

nreece 8y ago

Nitpicks aside, it seems to me that React/Vue are only/mainly useful for two-way data binding. If it's just one-way binding (i.e. JSON to template), then jQuery with something like Handlebars will be just fine. Correct me if I've misunderstood.

pygy_ 8y ago
React and Vue are immediate mode/declarative UI libs. Your code says "given the model/state, here's what I'd like the UI to look like right now", and they manage to mutate the DOM efficiently to achieve what you want. jQuery and the plain DOM are retained mode APIs. You manipulate stateful objects to achieve your goals. It is ok for simple interactions, but it quickly becomes unmanageable for more complex apps.

Cub3 8y ago

Since early in my career when hiring I've found developers who only know 'jQuery / Angular / Vue / React' but not the underlying Javascript, I swear "x is the new y" is said every time a new framework gets 6 months into vogue.

rhapsodic 8y ago
>Since early in my career when hiring I've found developers who only know 'jQuery / Angular / Vue / React' but not the underlying Javascript It's frightening, the degree to which many professional web app developers do not know the fundamentals of Javascript. Our technical interview starts out with ridiculously simple questions and gets progressively more difficult and esoteric. And a dismayingly high number of candidates don't get past the first couple of questions. And these are people with years of experience and at least some of the hot JS frameworks on their resume.

faitswulff 8y ago

Mods, can we change the title? The current title was clearly chosen to be inflammatory. Meanwhile, the original title only mentions VueJS, not React: "Replacing jQuery With Vue.js: No Build Step Necessary"

tracker1 8y ago

Vue is for enhancing web pages.. you can do applications, but they get very complex beyond small-mid sized apps. React is made for building web-based applications. You can do small stuff with it, but it's often overkill. Just because you can use a butter knife to turn a flathead screw, doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job. These days I might reach for Vue as a jQuery stand-in, but more likely, I'd use a smaller jQuery-like library, or just use straight vanilla JS, or other micro libraries. For anything big enough to deserve a build process React is absolutely my first choice.

nek4life 8y ago
Vue can be used to enhance web pages, but it works equally well if you want to build a large application. This was one of the design goals. Something that you can start small and scale up with that works equally well for both. If you use the Vue CLI you can have a setup with a router and build tools and setup something very similar to create react app.

yakshaving_jgt 8y ago

Brad Frost has significant social capital and influence. That's the only reason this charlatanry is given the time of day.

nobleach 8y ago

The problem was never jQuery. jQuery performed a very necessary function when it was created. It was always the intention of the lib to cease to be needed over time. The problem was/is the ecosystem created around jQuery. Want to do a thing? Do it with jQuery. Want to read a cookie? Use jQuery. Want an image carousel? Build it with jQuery. Want to do anything at all? jQuery. I do see something similar happening with our more junior devs. Their Google searches have now turned to "how do I read a cookie with React?"... and sure enough, there is a react-cookie lib - which may or may not be useful for their task... but since it says "react", it'll probably show up in a pull request. React can't be blamed for this though. All the ecosystem being built with the expectation of "well everyone's using React", _is_ a problem. Education about separation of concerns is the only solution I can see.

dmitri1981 8y ago

I wanted to try and address the points Brad makes and as well as clear up some of the misunderstandings in his post. Take a look https://medium.com/@dmitrigrabov/react-is-not-the-new-jquery-e42a19f165f4 https://medium.com/@dmitrigrabov/react-is-not-the-new-jquery...

sireat 8y ago

Coming from a background of doing embedded Javascript work(not web) I found React surprisingly easy to work with and joy to write code in. React feels like writing normal Javascript. Vue is very easy to embed into existing web page but feels like learning a new DSL instead of regular Javascript.

mikl 8y ago

> React is a big commitment. I guess that’s why I’m still struggling to comprehend why so many organizations are so eager to take the sturdy, foundational layer of the frontend stack and rewrite it all in a proprietary format. There’s nothing proprietary about React. It’s all open source. MIT licensed. If you don’t like Facebook’s implementation, there’s like a dozen re-implementations. Hell, a modestly competent software developer could write his own implementation of React in a few days of work. All else being equal, I’d say a React code base will be less of a maintenance hassle in the future, than the spaghetti mess you usually get when trying to write complex applications with jQuery (been there, done that).