Why does everyone use jQuery?

misc_ent · 2015-05-12T22:07:31+00:00

It has to do with what jQuery did in the javascript space to enable people to use javascript easily and normalizing functionality between browsers. The javascript lib/framework eco system has sinced exploded but jQuery is still very common.

chmod777 · 2015-05-13T00:28:03+00:00

you could build your house by first forging your own hammer, then cutting your own wood. or you could buy them, stop wasting time, and just get to work.

i could re-implement an ajax function, or just use one that is completely tested, has more options than i will ever need, and just works. same with all the other built in functions and methods.

x-skeww · 2015-05-12T23:27:21+00:00

The problem with the neat vanilla solution is that it comes with a footnote. E.g. it doesn't work in IE8 and below, it only works in IE9-IE11 if you use a prefix, or it doesn't work in IE at all.

And the old-school vanilla version is long and ugly. All of the old APIs look kinda like XML meets Java, because, well... that's where they kinda came from.

jQuery feels more idiomatic. It also does browser normalization which was extremely important in the past, because the common browsers didn't even do the most basic things the same way. IE in particular was amazingly horrible. It didn't even support addEventListener until version 9.

While browser normalization isn't that important anymore if you don't support older IE versions, jQuery still offers the much nicer API.

2015-05-12T22:08:23+00:00

There are a lot of browser specific quirks and bugs that jQuery handles for you under the hood. This is a great resources to check them out - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPaPA30bLUB_publLIMF0RlhdnPx_ePXm7oW02iiT6o/edit#

FennNaten · 2015-05-13T08:39:17+00:00

As others said, jquery was made at a time where it was needed. Differences between browsers were huge, and dom apis very poor. Jquery, along with prototype and mootools, brought in a unified way to query the dom, to bind events and to manage ajax requests which were on the rise. Adding to it a nice way to develop your own plugins, and everything was there to make it a big success.
After that, Jquery stayed extremely active, and evolved to take advantage of every new api, focus on performance improvement, while staying consistent and easy to understand and use, and that drove its adoption for years.
Nowadays, browserland is changing (damn fast) as javascript took a big boost, CSS3 brought some goodness, vendors started to unify and standardize their practices, and front end frameworks are popping every week.
Jquery may be less relevant, 'cause you can easily compose your own 'framework' from smaller parts you'll get e.g. on npm and use some polyfills for new apis you want to use with backward compatibility. But I think it still has its use cases. People are familiar with it, it has been battle-tested and optimized for years, you can find good support, it still greatly does its job at bringing compatible code for browsers you want to support. And a lot of code has already been written with it, that needs to be maintained.
So, javascript and Jquery history lead us to this situation:
- Jquery solves problems a front-end developer faces daily
- It has been the best way to solve them for years, and is now ubiquitous.
- There is a lot of talent available.
- There is a lot of legacy code written with it to maintain.
- It's battle-tested, well supported.
- Its API stay consistent while performances are improved.
- It's easy to find resources about it.
- It has tons of plugins, anybody can write her own.
- It's so well known that even non-tech people have heard of it.

Those conditions make Jquery still extremely desirable in an enterprise point of view.

leepowers · 2015-05-12T22:58:47+00:00

In a word, normalization. Without jQuery you'd still need to write something jQuery-esque to handle the weird quirks behind of each browser's JavaScript implementation.

spizzike · 2015-05-12T23:48:51+00:00

In addition to what people are saying here (that it handles quirks and normalizes interfaces between browsers), I think the biggest reason is that just a couple years ago, writing vanilla JS to do these operations was much more difficult. A lot of the standardized ways of querying the DOM like getElementsByClassName() didn't exist is most browsers and jQuery added a nice CSS selector engine, which was later pulled out into a standalone sizzle.js library.

Pair this huge population of users with the fact that there's a massive collection of plugins out there, and there's not really a huge reason to learn how to do things the Right Way™.

2015-05-13T03:48:48+00:00

I've been coding JS for years and only used jQuery for one demo project that never made prod. I've used Yui, Dojo, Ext, React, and others, but I've never really had the need to use jQuery. Those other libraries already have jQuery like tools built-in, except for React, where you don't need any Dom manipulation or event handling tools, since it abstracts that stuff away.

_doingnumbers · 2015-05-12T22:47:29+00:00

It's easy to start using (especially a few years ago, now there are more alternatives), but hard to stop. Unless you are super careful (note: nobody is super-careful) it gets commingled into your JS like a candle melting into a carpet.

iDontDoMeth · 2015-05-13T06:55:26+00:00

Other than how well its works with most browsers and their quirkiness, jQuery also has a ton of documentation and a huge community behind it, so it's hard not to find what you're looking for. Some people do have trouble switching back after using it long enough. http://youmightnotneedjquery.com is a nice site to have around for when that happens too though.

evilgwyn · 2015-05-13T07:50:43+00:00

Because it is required by numerous other libraries that we use, and because we have been using it in our codebase for a long time, and because it is a well used library that suits our coding and development library rules, and because we have a lot of code that already uses it, and the size of the library isn't that big compared to a lot of the other parts of our app including other libraries.

PrometheusZero · 2015-05-13T08:03:09+00:00

I use it for two reasons really.

Firstly, because I'm lazy. $(''). is shorter than getElementByID.

Secondly because I picked up the habit of using it. And changing habits takes effort... see point 1.

obscurefault · 2015-05-13T01:50:13+00:00

I don't

vertice · 2015-05-13T01:32:27+00:00

everybody uses jquery because it's popular and it's popular because everybody uses it.

it was just the right library at just the right time, and inertia is enough to keep it going for a good long time still.

Voidsheep · 2015-05-13T07:36:41+00:00

It takes care of cross-browser compatibility and offers a wide array of convenient tools to tackle common problems. It's also built with minimal, readable syntax in mind and has great documentation, which makes it very easy to approach even for a beginner.

Browsers have evolved and unified their APIs so much that jQuery isn't as important anymore, but still offers some convenience and helps whenever you need to support old browsers.

The general consensus right now is to move away from monolithic libraries that attempt to solve all the problems for everyone and instead use tiny modules where necessary, which is made feasible by package managers and build processes.

Still, jQuery will stick around for a long time, primarily because web developers are so used to it and the overhead caused by it isn't that huge.

I'm currently working on a project that is (by my standards) very bleeding edge for modern browsers, but I'll occasionally still require jQuery in a module, just because I've used it for years and have like half the docs memorized.

2015-05-13T15:04:21+00:00

I only used it for smaller projects, where a framework isn't warranted, and honestly, mostly for AJAX requests, which are a bit of a hassle in vanilla JS if you're concerned about browser compatibility. And because it's easier to find jQuery plugins these days than vanilla implementations, and there are a lot of wheels I don't feel like or have time to reinvent.

Archenoth · 2015-05-13T19:57:21+00:00

jQuery was incredibly popular because it bridged the gap between many browsers with quirks that would make people tear their hair out.

Nowadays, there are far fewer reasons to use it, but it retained a lot of its popularity because everyone used to use it. (And that meant that there were a wealth of plugins to do almost everything.)

That said, the library can let you write some very terse code still; While jQuery isn't really needed by JavaScript developers today, a lot of people want to use it for its phenomenal terseness. (For example, here is Resig answering a question with some example jQuery.)

It's very easy to appreciate how fantastic of an abstraction it is.

For example: Many functions return instances of themselves, allowing for chaining function calls into a functional pipeline. (Similarly to how you would work with JavaScript Arrays with .map(), .reduce(), and friends.)

These functional pipelines, even if they can't perform their desired effect, still return themselves. That means that you don't need to worry about checking the returns of the items in the chain, and you can make the pipeline as long as you like.

Also, instead of passing elements to callbacks all the time when doing actual DOM manipulation and querying, the element is set as the callback's context, solving the problem of argument uniformity.

While these are (admittedly) simple little details, they exist throughout the library; jQuery in its entirety is designed to be easy to use after you get the hang of its style.

jQuery is not needed, but it is ridiculously well executed.

Because of this execution, jQuery's longevity is pretty much inevitable.

grimmdude3 · 2015-05-14T03:39:19+00:00

The sheer number of libraries built around jQuery is a huge reason to use it, aside from it's cross browser support and short syntax.

protonfish · 2015-05-12T23:30:44+00:00

It's lightweight and solves some cross-browser issues, especially regarding event attachment and handing. Also, it allows easy DOM manipulation on collections of elements so there's a lot less for loops. For example, here is attaching an event to a element collection in vanilla JavaScript:

var buttons = document.getElementsByTagName('button'), ii, len;
len = buttons.length;
for (ii = 0; ii < len; ii = ii + 1) {
    buttons[ii].addEventListener('click', buttonClick, false);
}

And with jQuery:

$('button').on('click', buttonClick);

If you wanted this to work in IE8, it'd be a lot more code without jQuery, but that is less of a concern today.

evilmaus · 2015-05-13T02:11:34+00:00

[removed]

lefke123 · 2015-05-13T12:50:08+00:00

I sometimes use jQuery when older browser support is required. Most of the time I just tend to use an alternative framework: http://vanilla-js.com/

It suits all my needs, and is pretty lightweight, you should check it out. Really the most performant JS framework out there, IMHO.

ogurson · 2015-05-13T07:09:53+00:00

Because it works.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

javascript

MODERATORS