Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Foundation Helps Launch the JS Foundation (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Today, the Linux Foundation announced the creation of a new entity named the JS Foundation that will serve as an umbrella project and guiding force for various open-source utilities at the heart of the JavaScript ecosystem. The JS Foundation is actually the jQuery Foundation, which was expanded with the help of companies such as IBM and Samsung. With jQuery slowly bowing out to newer tools, the jQuery Foundation's members and their unmatched expertise will most likely be put to good use in managing the slew of new tools making up today's JavaScript landscape. The list of JS Foundation founding members includes Bocoup, IBM, Ripple, Samsung, Sauce Labs, Sense Tecnic Systems, SitePen, StackPath, University of Westminster and WebsiteSetup. In alphabetical order, the JS Foundation's initial projects are Appium, Chassis, Dojo Toolkit, ESLint, Esprima, Globalize, Grunt, Interledger.js, Intern, Jed, JerryScript, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, Lodash, Mocha, Moment, Node-RED, PEP, QUnit, RequireJS, Sizzle, and webpack. "Using jQuery can constitute the use of a sledgehammer for putting small nails into an Ikea TV stand; however, as a piece of engineering, it really is a thing of beauty," says A. M. Douglas, British freelance web developer. "[T]he word 'jQuery' has become synonymous with 'JavaScript' for many. As of today, jQuery's days as a relevant tool are indeed numbered, but I think jQuery's source code will always have relevance, as it is a brilliant example to study for anybody seeking to learn and master JavaScript," Douglas also adds.
jQuery is most likely destined, in the end, to become a victim of its own success. The features it provides are so essential, so clearly superior to the old DOM APIs, that those APIs have been and are still being substantially upgraded to natively incorporate most of jQuery's marquee features. I actually have a list on my work computer of all of the major jQuery features and what might replace them. The big one, jQuery's selector syntax, is a standard feature these days as querySelector and querySelectorAll. The AJAX wrapper and associated chaining behavior can be replaced with the Fetch API and Promises. Functional programming methods like each and map are standard on every modern browser and a lot of older ones. jQuery's animation is fine — but Velocity's is better.
Of course, if you want to support older browsers, then you may need polyfills for new features. Most of your users won't need most of the polyfills. In time, those polyfills will go away. jQuery may occasionally prune workarounds for ancient browsers, but it will always be filled with incompatible reimplementations of functionality that modern browsers already have, out-of-the-box, running in native compiled code. You could write a similar library in a fraction of the size that provides most of jQuery's convenience features on top of the standard APIs.
My company uses mainly jQuery UI-style widgets for some fairly substantial applications. Through painful experience, we've learned how difficult it can be to scale that approach to complex, multifaceted applications. It's not just about how easy it is to write it the first time, but about what it takes to maintain all of that mutable state in a couple of years. For us, using React isn't a way to be hip with the kids, but a way to avoid the maintenance headaches we've experienced with jQuery.
The hackernoon link seems rather oriented toward simple, hack-it-together sorts of applications. Yes, if you're just making a personal web page or something you probably don't need a complete build system or anything like that.
Please stop using Java's coffee cup icon for Javascript....