Ask HN: Is jQuery on its way out?
I still use jQuery and won&#x27;t be ditching it anytime soon.<p>End users don&#x27;t know or care if an app uses it or React&#x2F;Angular&#x2F;Vue.<p>I&#x27;ve built SPAs with it and don&#x27;t see why that&#x27;s a problem for others who&#x27;ve mentioned it, but that&#x27;s because I don&#x27;t know what specific problems they ran into. I&#x27;ve not run into any.<p>But, I also use CouchDB as a backend, almost all my app code is JS running in the browser, and I don&#x27;t use Node.js at all. I still do my server side work in Perl. So I&#x27;m not building apps like most are right now.<p>React&#x2F;Angular&#x2F;Vue, etc, might work better for some apps, and&#x2F;or apps with a zillion users hitting the server a zillion times, but my apps don&#x27;t have either of those issues to deal with. They barely touch my web server or the CouchDB. All the heavy lifting is done in the user&#x27;s web browser.<p>The only real downside to that design approach, if we choose to call it that, is that we don&#x27;t track every click a user makes, but as a user I really like knowing that.<p>The best thing about going with jQuery is I didn&#x27;t really have to learn how to use it. I do that on a need to know basis and generally go to Stackoverflow where I almost always find the best way along with a few other ways to do something.<p>I&#x27;ll offer that using a &quot;much smaller, lighter weight library&quot; offers a kind of a false sense of gain. You can use Service Workers to cache jQuery on the client side, or a CDN to deliver it, so it&#x27;s not really costing you much (or any) bandwidth to deliver it to users, and modern web browsers are not choking on the size of it. I test my apps on a old Raspberry Pi running their latest OS and Chrome and they&#x27;re plenty fast (very fast).<p>Here&#x27;s the thing. I spent about two months looking for the &quot;Best&quot; way to build apps. Most of that time was going over frameworks at TodoMVC.com. When I was finished I didn&#x27;t have any better idea of what was best than when I&#x27;d started, but I did have a clue about what I&#x27;d have invest to get up to speed with them, and in most cases it was lot.<p>So, I decided to instead explore what was the easiest way, and not just for me really, though I don&#x27;t expect anyone should agree, but just generally speaking I tried to consider that.<p>I use the Apache web server and CouchDB, PouchDB.js, jQuery, and Bootstrap. It&#x27;s a pretty amazing feature set those tools provide, and how easy they are to use together.<p>Almost no one I know does it this way.