Ask HN: Why is jQuery everywhere?

6 points

14 years ago

I use jQuery extensively and have done so for years now. Its a great lib that's really easy to use so I guess that explains to some degree its pervasiveness ( roughly 50% of top milltion sites according to http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript). But once you get into complex applications it becomes a nightmare - at least in my experience. jQuery UI is very limited and for building enterprise interfaces Dojo and ExtJS blow jQuery out of the water.

Is this 50% then everything that's not webapps with complex interfaces? Do any frontend devs actually use jQuery for user interaction (beyond slideshows and the massive amount of plugins)? Has anyone come up with a way to tame jQuery soupe and organize it into something maintainable on large applications?

I'd like to know what the community of js developers thinks about this and the future of jQuery, since for the past year or so I've more or less given up on it asside from simple frontend stuff and use almost exclusively Dojo and ExtJS for my apps.

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