5 ms·

You say you don't believe that mashing together frameworks is actual development, yet you recommend the jQuery framework for front-end coding. Do you draw a di

You say you don't believe that mashing together frameworks is actual development, yet you recommend the jQuery framework for front-end coding. Do you draw a distinction between front-end and back-end - is front-end work not really development? In my experience, the time it takes to become proficient with an existing framework is generally a lot shorter than writing a framework yourself. And, generally, the existing one will have been vetted by thousands of people before me.

terryjsmith 16y ago
jQuery is nice because you can jump back and forth between it and "regular" Javascript. Inside your $(id).click() function you can just as easily call document.getElementById. jQuery even provides you access to all of the DOM level objects in case you want to escape outside of it for a bit. Most frameworks do not let you do this and you have to actually have to work at it/hack at it to use functionality that isn't provided by them.
dinkumthinkum 16y ago
Well, one major reason to use jQuery, besides all of the cool APIs, is that it encapsulates most of that messy browser specific stuff you have to account for which is not that analogous to what you have to do with most programming languages.
rick888 16y ago
"You say you don't believe that mashing together frameworks is actual development, yet you recommend the jQuery framework for front-end coding. Do you draw a distinction between front-end and back-end - is front-end work not really development?" I use it sparingly. Mostly because there are many quirks between the various browsers and jquery seems to have a pretty good handle on it. As an example: rather than using one of the many bloated pagination libraries I found based on Jquery, I rolled my own in less code. It ended up much smaller because I didn't have to incorporate everything in the existing libraries. Most frameworks throw in everything, because they have to account for all possibilities, rather than just the ones that you need. You end up with bloated code, unless you know how it works behind the scenes (and many times even if you do, you can't take out the parts that you don't need).

terryjsmith 16y ago

jQuery is nice because you can jump back and forth between it and "regular" Javascript. Inside your $(id).click() function you can just as easily call document.getElementById. jQuery even provides you access to all of the DOM level objects in case you want to escape outside of it for a bit. Most frameworks do not let you do this and you have to actually have to work at it/hack at it to use functionality that isn't provided by them.

dinkumthinkum 16y ago

Well, one major reason to use jQuery, besides all of the cool APIs, is that it encapsulates most of that messy browser specific stuff you have to account for which is not that analogous to what you have to do with most programming languages.

rick888 16y ago

"You say you don't believe that mashing together frameworks is actual development, yet you recommend the jQuery framework for front-end coding. Do you draw a distinction between front-end and back-end - is front-end work not really development?" I use it sparingly. Mostly because there are many quirks between the various browsers and jquery seems to have a pretty good handle on it. As an example: rather than using one of the many bloated pagination libraries I found based on Jquery, I rolled my own in less code. It ended up much smaller because I didn't have to incorporate everything in the existing libraries. Most frameworks throw in everything, because they have to account for all possibilities, rather than just the ones that you need. You end up with bloated code, unless you know how it works behind the scenes (and many times even if you do, you can't take out the parts that you don't need).