Which is Jquery's future?

This article is explaining my opinion on Jquery's future.

So what is Jquery?

From my point of view is a library that helps the client-side with DOM manipulation and HTTP calls. On the other hand, you want a more technical explanation W3School has the following opinion: jQuery is a lightweight, "write less, do more", JavaScript library. The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website. jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that require many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish and wraps them into methods that you can call with a single line of code. jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM manipulation.

A bit of history

jQuery was originally created in January 2006 at BarCamp, and since then it had regular updates.

Some statistics: In 2015, jQuery was used on 62.7% of the top 1 million websites and 17% of all Internet websites.

In 2017, jQuery was used on 69.2% of the top 1 million websites.

In 2018, jQuery was used on 78% of the top 1 million websites.

In 2019, jQuery was used on 80% of the top 1 million websites.

Google trends 05/2019 - 05/2020 for Jquery vs React vs Vue

Personal opinion about Jquery

I look at Jquery with a lot of respect. It did help me when doing front end work. It stood by my side and always gave me that cross-browser support when I worked in projects with legacy code, projects that don't use Vue or React.

You might say looking at the above statistics that Jquery was the king on the client-side. I have to say that you are right, he was and in some cases he still is, but… I do enjoy using jquery to create functionality until the point…where the user needs to reload the page in order to update the data. Now doesn't that sound wrong? Everything was fine until that point, but the need for a page to reload is a bit too much. That is the point where a lot of devs, especially front end ones, felt that we should move on and evolve.

Component-based frameworks. What are they?

The time has passed and React came along, and after Vue and so on. And we finally achieved what we wanted on the front end, make the data flow without the need for a page reload.

React and Vue, are two beautiful javascript frameworks that allow us to build the UI in components. They do raise a lot of issues when you start working with them but once you're up and running, the speed of development is very high.

Why front-end devs support component-based libraries?

To transition from jquery to React or Vue you have to learn a new set of skills.

When react came along it burned out a lot of front-end devs because it was a new way of doing things.

Basically, everything you have learned to do with Jquery, wasn't valid anymore, in React or Vue.

Taking into consideration that some front-end dev knew jquery better than vanilla javascript the level of discomfort was even higher.

So why learn a new js library in order to achieve the same things?

Answer: State management, virtual DOM, and performance.

So what's the next bus stop for Jquery?

From a technology point of view, it can do the job pretty well, but it lacks reactivity.

Jquery was a good tool for the time when websites were more static.

As the need evolved, Jquery was struggling to keep up with tasks.

As a developer, it's a good skill to have. There is a lot of code written with Jquery and a lot of companies will still need maintenance and new features to be added to their website.

As an entrepreneur, I would recommend using an application written with Vue or React.

Conclusion

Jquery is not dead for the time being, but it's not the first option anymore when building a reactive web application. As I said, it's a good skill to have in order to work on projects which have legacy code.