Jquery on the way out?

I read an article a few days ago, and meant to ask about this sooner. It was more of a tutorial/lesson kind of thing, but it encouraged the reader not use any jquery, because jquery was not worth it to summarize it. Is this true?

I didn’t understand the argument because jquery was not worth it to summarize it.

jQuery is one of the best tools there since people can do more with fewer lines.

And yeah, it’s not advised to use jQuery or any other library or framework, if one doesn’t have enough JS knowledge, or else they may end up doing things they don’t understand. (If this is what they mean).

I’m not sure how I came across the article to honest. Searching for something I guess, but I’ve already been through my jquery course in school. I just wanted to see what people’s thoughts were. From what I remember the author described jquery as being outdated, and not being around for much longer.

My instructor from a coding boot-camp advised me that eventually people will stop using J-Query, it was huge in the past, but not anymore. Now He mainly want us to put our focus on solid Js and their frameworks(React, Vue and Angular)…

jQuery was written when there were significant differences between (and gaps in) different browser implementations of DOM APIs (ie how you manipulate elements on a web page). It smoothed over those differences, and had (still has) a great API; it’s really easy and generally pleasant to to use. Coupled to that, it has a really nice wrapper around browser AJAX implementations.

It’s problem now is that it won, basically. It kinda forced browser APIs forward quite a lot, and now, on the whole, they have the features that jQuery provided. It used to be necessary to include jQuery, but even though the API is still nice, and it’s still easy to use, it’s kinda obselete. Also note there has been a trend for desktop-like apps (single page apps) in the browser, and jQuery isn’t good at that - Rest/Angular/Vue/etc do it better

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AFAIK, jQuery accomplished 3 big things when it came out:

  1. It made cross browser compatibility a little better. This is less of an issue now.

  2. It made AJAX easier. But now JS has fetch so this is less of an issue.

  3. It makes manipulating the DOM easier. If you’re not using Angular/React/Vue, then this is very useful.

So, I think it’s less useful than it used to be. But it still is useful. And there are still new sites using it. And there are a lot of legacy sites using it.

It’s a useful tool. It is not a “perfect” tool. but there is no such thing. It is a good tool in some and not appropriate in others. It is less useful than it used to be (because some of it is now built in) but it still has its uses.

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Jquery is definitely on the way out and you are hard pressed to find any job offerings that need you to know JQuery. It’s biggest strengths, easy DOM manipulation and asynchronous requests have been made a lot easier with vanilla JS. The biggest reason to learn it is that there are still so many websites out there that rely on it. If you ever have to work on one, being able to read what is does is a big plus.

Here is an overview of current use of JS libraries, see how JQuery is still dominating the web:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/javascript_library/all/q

Note that it is not tracking frameworks in use but still there is not a real decline in websites that use JQuery.

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