I agree the API and the chaining are nice in some cases. And I agree that native JS is less pretty.
But I personally don't use it anymore since a while now. I either use React/Next + Redux if they are a good fit, or just plain native JS otherwise. JQuery doesn't solve enough of a problem (anymore) for me to be worth loading and adhere to.
If I do the latter then my code is often structured the same (per module).
- defining some utility functions
- setting up state and state-transformation / "top-level" functions
- getting the DOM elements (once)
- defining DOM mutations on those elements based on the state, usually call these "render" functions.
- registering event handlers on those elements which call the top-level functions and pass the new state to the render functions.
I know this is kind of a dumb/rigid approach, but it suits me well. There is not much obvious use for jQuery here. The only place where the nice chaining API would be useful are the DOM mutations (sometimes) but I haven't found this to be a huge deal.
As soon as I need to do more AJAX, inserting/removing whole Nodes/NodeLists, have more involved state management and policy then jQuery doesn't help anyways and a more sophisticated framework is more fitting (like React/Next + Redux).
But I personally don't use it anymore since a while now. I either use React/Next + Redux if they are a good fit, or just plain native JS otherwise. JQuery doesn't solve enough of a problem (anymore) for me to be worth loading and adhere to.
If I do the latter then my code is often structured the same (per module).
- defining some utility functions
- setting up state and state-transformation / "top-level" functions
- getting the DOM elements (once)
- defining DOM mutations on those elements based on the state, usually call these "render" functions.
- registering event handlers on those elements which call the top-level functions and pass the new state to the render functions.
I know this is kind of a dumb/rigid approach, but it suits me well. There is not much obvious use for jQuery here. The only place where the nice chaining API would be useful are the DOM mutations (sometimes) but I haven't found this to be a huge deal.
As soon as I need to do more AJAX, inserting/removing whole Nodes/NodeLists, have more involved state management and policy then jQuery doesn't help anyways and a more sophisticated framework is more fitting (like React/Next + Redux).