(Why) Is jQuery dead?
Whether or not jQuery is dead seems to be a hot topic for people in the coding world. So, I decided to explore it myself. When I first started learning javascript, I learned jQuery so when I found out it was on the decline, I was a little surprised.
To understand what happened to jQuery, you have to understand what jQuery is. JQuery is a javascript library with many features made for making websites dynamic. It has event handling, animation, DOM traversal, and more. What jQuery did when it was first created was make AJAX easier and allowed people to easily access to the DOM to make their pages less static.
This sounds like something we do today in Javascript, and that’s because it is. JQuery is similar to react where it broke down Javascript coding into digestable blocks. What made jQuery special was that it had ways of making the AJAX and event handling much easier for coders before many other libraries did. So, jQuery was early to the game and did something new, which is what made it so popular.
Another thing that made jQuery popular was that other frameworks and libraries drew from it, one famous example being Bootstrap. Bootstrap perfectly exemplifies what happened to jQuery as it is dropping jQuery as a dependency in the new version.
JQuery is useful, but what killed it was it’s widespread use. Vanilla Javascript kept updating so that things that made jQuery special became things that you found in Javascript without jQuery. So, it started becoming obsolete. React is a framework that many use in place of jQuery now because it does the job of organizing code into workable blocks but also has extra functionality that is not available in vanilla Javascript. It still has something special about it.
As languages update and evolve, certain frameworks and libraries need to be reworked or left behind because technology moves fast. JQuery is a perfect example of what happens to a library that does not change enough with the times.
So, is jQuery dead? It is still used in things like Wordpress, which means it is still widely used. But it is dying. As other framework and libraries drop jQuery as a dependency, it will slowly be used less and less until it is not needed at all.
