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Why jQuery is still viable

The developer community seems to have a love-hate relationship with jQuery and it does not seem to end anytime soon regardless of what people say. These days, everyone prophecies the death of jQuery and how it is now irrelevant but the reality is jQuery is probably the most used framework even till date when you consider the sheer number of websites still using the library. But for the sake of the uninitiated, allow me to introduce the library.

What is jQuery?

According to the official jQuery website, jQuery “is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers. With a combination of versatility and extensibility, jQuery has changed the way that millions of people write JavaScript”.
jQuery was originally created in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig, influenced by Dean Edwards’ earlier cssQuery library. It is currently maintained by a team of developers led by Timmy Willison (with the jQuery selector engine, Sizzle, being led by Richard Gibson).
In my experience, I find jQuery to have the best and shortest syntax amongst all the frameworks and libraries I have played with and that includes React and Angular. The only complaints most developers seem to have against jQuery is based on the fact that jQuery is not as fast as the newer ones mostly due to the lack of the trendy virtual DOM, and with the speed difference being just a few hundred milliseconds at best (I built my own benchmark app to test it) there isn’t much to worry about over there. Other times, it is knocked because “it is unsuitable for large projects” and I am not entirely sure what that means. 

jQuery is still viable

Granted, the library is not an absolute necessity for developers today as it once was back in its hay days but despite that fact, it is very much needed if you want to work on or support older/legacy projects. This is highly likely when you find yourself working in a company that has been around for a while. But the usefulness of jQuery goes beyond that because there are still developers out there who still use it for new projects especially when working on a small project and you don’t want to download several hundred megabytes (to an over a gigabyte) worths of node modules just so you can use React, Angular or Vue for your single-page web app.
New developers who don’t want to spend the time to learn jQuery may disagree with me though but when the statement above is considered together with the fact that it has a shorter and much more readable syntax, it immediately becomes a viable alternative even today as it is always a good practice to use the technology that is best suited for the specific project.

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