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.

Comments

First order of business.

[Narcocide]

Shut it down. Shut it down forever. -- Mr. Book, "Dark City"

Re:First order of business.

[tepples]

Why do you consider it desirable to shut down the ability to make an app once and run it on Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android?

Re:First order of business.

[Narcocide]

As someone who has been writing JavaScript professionally for 20 years, I feel my opinion on this is valid.

jQuery monoculture

[manu0601]

jQuery is now a monoculture, and some day we will have to face the price of it.

Re:jQuery monoculture

[Shados]

It's pretty common nowaday to make websites/webapps without jQuery at all, or to only use it for some legacy plugins and shit.

Far from a monoculture at this point (probably half the reason that foundation got renamed...)

Re: jQuery monoculture

[Billly Gates]

Yeah because of IE 6 - 8.

So yes if the site works don't break it! But, that doesn't mean it's used for new projects for modern browsers and mobile apps. Typescript and angular are what the cool kids are using these days

Re:jQuery monoculture

[irrational_design]

What are you talking about? I don't know anyone creating anything new that is using jQuery. Now that the majority of people have an evergreen browser installed, the need for jQuery has diminished to the point that I don't know anyone that still uses it unless the client specifically needs the site to run on ancient versions of IE (and since those version of IE have reached End of Life Support, most clients can be convinced not to do that). Are you talking about paying some sort of price for all the websites that were created with jQuery previously? What kind of price will we have to pay?

Re:jQuery monoculture

[manu0601]

What are you talking about?

Many web apps will come bundled with jQuery to support older browsers. Even if you do not use it, it is there. You notice it when you try to deploy Content-Security-Policy, because you need script-src: unsafe-inline.

What kind of price will we have to pay?

The usual price of monoculture are security problems. Same software everywhere is a sweet target for attackers.

Re:jQuery monoculture

[irrational_design]

"Many web apps will come bundled with jQuery to support older browsers." I honestly have no idea what you are talking about here. When you say "web app" what exactly are you thinking about? Are you talking about something like Google Docs (which is clearly a web app) maybe using jQuery (I have no idea if it does, but this is just an example)? What would it matter to me, as a developer that some web app online uses jQuery or not? That would just be a problem for that one development team if they ever want to move away from jQuery. The fact that one web app is using jQuery doesn't have any affect on all the other web apps.

How so?

[ProzacPatient]

jQuery's days as a relevant tool are indeed numbered

How is jQuery's days numbered; is it no longer hipster enough?

Maybe I didn't get the memo but as a professional web developer I still find jQuery immensely useful.

Re:How so?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How so?

[Jahta]

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.

Sadly, that's not the case. The whole Javascript/front-end development scene is awash with tools/libraries du jour; what this article calls "magpie front-end developers". As the cited Airbnb example demonstrates, there's a quite a few large web development teams using shiny new things because they are "cool" but that don't add much (if any) business value.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

why use jQuery when VanillaJS loads faster and is proven bug free?
VanillaJS is used by more websites than jQuery.

Re:Obligatory

[KiloByte]

There's another JavaScript framework I'd heartily recommend.

Re:Obligatory

[DrXym]

Why use any framework when a lot of these fundamental libraries only exist to paper over the cracks in JavaScript. Fix JavaScript.

But Linux is so cool.

[Bing Tsher E]

The Linux Foundation serves a good purpose.

Javascript???

Isn't that just something hackers use to corrupt websites with?

Wrong icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop using Java's coffee cup icon for Javascript....

Depends on your JS whitelisting criteria

[tepples]

If by "noscript.net" you meant whitelisting only those applications with a legitimate need for script, I'd agree. But if by "noscript.net" you meant that no application has a legitimate need for script, I'd have to disagree.

Would you prefer that JavaScript applications be instead served as static HTML pages styled with CSS, with all logic server-side? A web-based paint program, for example, would need to use a server-side image map instead of Canvas and operate by click-wait-click-wait-click instead of dragging. A web-based video game would have to be turn-based. And a Canvas-based vector animation viewer (which is at least better than Flash) would have to render the sequence of frames to WebM on the server side, which bloats the video by a factor of ten in my tests.

Or would you prefer that applications be instead written in the platform's preferred language and UI library? Good luck running a Mac app written in Swift and using Cocoa Touch API on your Windows PC or a Windows app written in C# and using WPF on your Mac.

Re:NOT EVEN ONCE

[tepples]

Let me try to guess the Linux Foundation's reasoning: Without JavaScript, developers are more likely to make Windows-exclusive apps instead of web apps that can be run in a browser on X11/Linux.

Linus's thoughts?

[slapout]

I wonder what Linus thinks of Javascript