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i offer wonder where the state of the web would be if John Resig never would have created jquery. i think everyone who is into web development today owes a than

i offer wonder where the state of the web would be if John Resig never would have created jquery. i think everyone who is into web development today owes a thank you to him. jquery single-handedly made programming on the browser easier.

becauseiam 8y ago
I agree - jQuery has done a lot to help inspire what querySelector and fetch are today (among many other things). The only cause for concern I have is what might frameworks in current vogue might do to influence standard APIs of the future.
fruzz 8y ago
I agree, you can't talk about web development history without bringing up jQuery. That said, the moment was right for something like it to come up. The amount of boiler plate code needed to enable rich web experiences of the time went up with the popularization of AJAX, and it was inevitable that something would solve that pain point.
- irrational 8y ago
  That's how I feel about the current state of web development. It really feels like the right time for something to come up and replace React/Vue/Angular with all of their myriad associated libraries for data, routing, etc. Something that is incredibly simpler.
  - unaaaa 8y ago
    Vue is already ridiculously simple; how much easier can it get? You don't even need to mess around with a complicated build pipeline, just reference the vue lib in a script tag and get going.
    - irrational 8y ago
      What I really want is it to be built into the browser so I don't have to use a library at all for the things React/Vue/Angular do.
xellisx 8y ago
Moo tools...
mtmail 8y ago
> jquery single-handedly made programming on the browser easier. Besides jQuery there were several competing libraries abstracting the browser inconsistencies: YUI (Y=Yahoo), prototypejs, mootools, dojo. So I'd say multi-handedly.
- jordigh 8y ago
  I also remember Scriptaculous which at some point got somehow merged with Prototype and became Protaculous.
  - duiker101 8y ago
    That's like, the hardest name I've ever had to read.
    - sushid 8y ago
      Reminds of the old days when Karma was named Testacular.
- hitekker 8y ago
  Eh, they have their place in history but jQuery was at least 10x more popular than all of the others combined. Strong leadership without the bickering and bikeshedding that ruined its competitors.
- pmlnr 8y ago
  I started with prototypejs. I never understood why jquery was the one that really took off.
thrownaway954 8y ago
I should also mention that Dean Edward's cssquery was the inspiration behind jquery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#History
mosdl 8y ago
add gave us lots of devs who don't know how to use the DOM directly without jquery.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  And don't get me started on people who have strictly zero idea about TCP/IP. Or silicon wafer design, for that matter.
brailsafe 8y ago
Ya ya thanks John. Real subtle.
ninkendo 8y ago
I've only really worn a "web developer" hat twice in my career so far (both for internal tools), once in 2011-2013, and another from 2014-2015. The first time around was rails with HAML/sass, with a light sprinkling of jquery used like CSS, mainly to make things like sortable tables, search w/ typeahead find, and a few other fancy things work. The second time around I used rails as a REST api and wrote an angular 1.x SPA for the frontend. Honestly, the first time around was far, far nicer from a developer ergonomics perspective. Just writing your HTML in nice reusable, composable templates, even though there's a lot of scary abstraction violations being able to access @variables from your ruby controllers, was a very straightforward experience. And the jquery was used mostly like CSS with something to the effect of `$("input.search").search({...});` to just apply a jquery plugin to all css-selected elements indiscriminately. And you know what? It was pretty darned easy! Move onto the next problem. My angular experience was far more complicated, and building the SPA was a level of effort on par with designing an entire application from scratch, with almost as much time spent developing it as I spent on the backend code. You can talk a lot about how jquery isn't necessary because you can do equivalent stuff without it, and I'd totally agree, but it was just the perfect tool for what I needed it for at the time. Lots of awesome plugins to enhance (with graceful fallbacks) the views that rails spit out, without me having to write anything. Angular had lots of cool plugins too but the level of effort was just too high.

becauseiam 8y ago

I agree - jQuery has done a lot to help inspire what querySelector and fetch are today (among many other things). The only cause for concern I have is what might frameworks in current vogue might do to influence standard APIs of the future.

fruzz 8y ago

I agree, you can't talk about web development history without bringing up jQuery. That said, the moment was right for something like it to come up. The amount of boiler plate code needed to enable rich web experiences of the time went up with the popularization of AJAX, and it was inevitable that something would solve that pain point.

irrational 8y ago
That's how I feel about the current state of web development. It really feels like the right time for something to come up and replace React/Vue/Angular with all of their myriad associated libraries for data, routing, etc. Something that is incredibly simpler.
- unaaaa 8y ago
  Vue is already ridiculously simple; how much easier can it get? You don't even need to mess around with a complicated build pipeline, just reference the vue lib in a script tag and get going.
  - irrational 8y ago
    What I really want is it to be built into the browser so I don't have to use a library at all for the things React/Vue/Angular do.

xellisx 8y ago

Moo tools...

mtmail 8y ago

> jquery single-handedly made programming on the browser easier. Besides jQuery there were several competing libraries abstracting the browser inconsistencies: YUI (Y=Yahoo), prototypejs, mootools, dojo. So I'd say multi-handedly.

jordigh 8y ago
I also remember Scriptaculous which at some point got somehow merged with Prototype and became Protaculous.
- duiker101 8y ago
  That's like, the hardest name I've ever had to read.
  - sushid 8y ago
    Reminds of the old days when Karma was named Testacular.
hitekker 8y ago
Eh, they have their place in history but jQuery was at least 10x more popular than all of the others combined. Strong leadership without the bickering and bikeshedding that ruined its competitors.
pmlnr 8y ago
I started with prototypejs. I never understood why jquery was the one that really took off.

thrownaway954 8y ago

I should also mention that Dean Edward's cssquery was the inspiration behind jquery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQuery#History

mosdl 8y ago

add gave us lots of devs who don't know how to use the DOM directly without jquery.

Piskvorrr 8y ago
And don't get me started on people who have strictly zero idea about TCP/IP. Or silicon wafer design, for that matter.

brailsafe 8y ago

Ya ya thanks John. Real subtle.

ninkendo 8y ago

I've only really worn a "web developer" hat twice in my career so far (both for internal tools), once in 2011-2013, and another from 2014-2015. The first time around was rails with HAML/sass, with a light sprinkling of jquery used like CSS, mainly to make things like sortable tables, search w/ typeahead find, and a few other fancy things work. The second time around I used rails as a REST api and wrote an angular 1.x SPA for the frontend. Honestly, the first time around was far, far nicer from a developer ergonomics perspective. Just writing your HTML in nice reusable, composable templates, even though there's a lot of scary abstraction violations being able to access @variables from your ruby controllers, was a very straightforward experience. And the jquery was used mostly like CSS with something to the effect of `$("input.search").search({...});` to just apply a jquery plugin to all css-selected elements indiscriminately. And you know what? It was pretty darned easy! Move onto the next problem. My angular experience was far more complicated, and building the SPA was a level of effort on par with designing an entire application from scratch, with almost as much time spent developing it as I spent on the backend code. You can talk a lot about how jquery isn't necessary because you can do equivalent stuff without it, and I'd totally agree, but it was just the perfect tool for what I needed it for at the time. Lots of awesome plugins to enhance (with graceful fallbacks) the views that rails spit out, without me having to write anything. Angular had lots of cool plugins too but the level of effort was just too high.