The jQuery library is already ten years old. It was created for the era of web development, which we have definitely passed. jQuery is not an indispensable technology for working with the DOM or making asynchronous HTTP requests. Almost everything you can do with jQuery can be done without it. And if you’re only interested in a couple of small, simple interactions with the DOM in one or two modern browsers, it might be better to use native DOM methods rather than jQuery.
However, you should use jQuery for any development related to BOM (browser-based document model) or DOM, not just cosmetic interactions. Otherwise, you will reinvent the wheel (i.e. jQuery abstraction elements) and then test it on all sorts of tracks (i.e. in mobile and PC browsers).
Experienced developers know what it means to “stand on the shoulders of giants” and when to avoid excessive complexity. In most cases we cannot do without jQuery anyway, when we need to do non-trivial work related to HTML and DOM in a short time.
Besides, even if jQuery didn’t solve a single problem with the DOM or with various browser implementations of the DOM specification, the importance of the API itself wouldn’t diminish one bit, since it’s so convenient for HTML scripting.
And jQuery is improving, and programmers can work smarter and faster with it. That’s the situation today, and it was so when the library was created. Saying “I don’t need jQuery” is like saying “I can do without lo-dash or underscore.js”. Of course, you can do without them. But that’s not how you judge their value.
Their value is in API. Too much complexity can slow down development. That’s why we like such things as lo-dash and jQuery – they simplify things. And because jQuery makes complex tasks easier (like writing scripts for HTML), it won’t get old.
Appendix – important facts about jQuery
- The jQuery library was written by John Resig and was released on August 26, 2006. John admitted that he wrote this code to “revolutionize the way JavaScript interacts with HTML”.
- jQuery is considered the most popular and sought-after modern JavaScript library.
- jQuery is free software, provided under license from MIT.
- There are two versions of jQuery. Version 1.x supports Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8\, and 2.x only supports IE9+. If you need support for IE8, you’ll have to work with version 1.x. But that’s okay, both versions are still under active development.
- The minimum version of jQuery 2.x is 82kb in size. The Gzip archive is about 28k.
- Minimal version of jQuery 1.x has size 96kb. The Gzip archive is about 32k.
- The source code of jQuery is available on Github.
- You can create your own version of jQuery based on the source code from Github.
- jQuery can be installed using the bower or npm package manager (i.e. $ bower install jquery or npm install jquery).
