Didn't really wanted to start a discussion. Just expressed my private opinion applied to this particular situation, not really trying to make any general claims.
> 1) It's 90k minified Only 90? Great! >2) Those 10 lines will inevitably be 1 line of jQuery No, my custom line will be 11th one. >3) Those 10 lines will work in your favorite browser; then you find >that IE x has some quirk you didn't count on, etc XMLHTTPRequest is the only thing (thanks Computer God!) that works the same way everywhere. All browsers employ MS XMLHTTP interface. Only difference is in the initialization process, and this is why it requires 10 lines of code, not 1 or 2. >4) You and Claude S will best friends, I can tell Does it mean I am blacklisted now? > jQuery core is only 229K uncompressed... This, of course, is much better than 300. >Do those 10 lines of code enable you to write different handlers >depending on the status code and success of the http call without any >fuss? Do they translate common response formats into plain js objects >for you? Yes, I could, but I don't need to, and I don't want to. I am calling MY Web-site, I know EXACTLY what to expect. I don't want library function to perform checks for situations, which will never happen. I want to have my own interface that fits my needs better. Unless I forced to do so, I will make entire HTML cooking on the server-side (this is why we use ColdFusion) and just dump results to the browser, to avoid annoying freezes of client's browser, while it processes "JS objects", JSONs, XMLs, and created HTML on the fly. If you move server-side processing to the client side, than yes, you might need something like jQuery to help you with this. But, from my point of view, this is some different programming concept that significantly differs from the client-server paradigm that assumes that client must be as stupid and as simple, as possible. >To be clear, even on Edge or 56K dial-up, non-cached Jquery, with all its >built-in goodness, arrives in less than a second...so...I really can't >imagine why rolling your own "just-enough" JS would be better. At least >when it comes to speed/performance This is because you think that 1 sec is a short time and can be ignored. I have a different vision of this. I would fight for this 1 sec. As well as for the size of browser's working set. >Clearly, use whatever you like...but...wrt your harvester analogy: when >the harvester is free, doesn't impact speed/performance, and will handle >the 10 square feet of grass and the 10 hectares of grass...I'm not seeing >the drawback of using it for both No, this is a wrong example. The correct one is when you try to build a car that simultaneously can be used as a truck, limo, and participate in Formula-1. And yes, it must be electrical. Convertible? Please... Perhaps, you could build something like this, but in reality it is much better to have 3 or 4 DIFFERENT cars for different purposes. The only place where you can find a piece of free cheese is a mousetrap... >jQuery (and other libraries) is well tested, well maintained, hugely >popular and well thought out. All these things will have an impact on >the speed of development and quality of code, especially for someone >who wasn't coding before these things were commonplace. >Andrei's assertion that using jQuery in this case would be 'nonsense' >ignores these pertinent benefits and is itself nonsense. My definition of "library" is something that contains millions of books, but I can come there and borrow a SINGLE book I need, rather than carry back home all millions books. jQuery is a great exercise in JS programming. Never could imagine that so many things could be done in the browser! All those flying DIVs and popping images are amazing and REALLY require significant amount of efforts to create and maintain, especially considering the "browsers war". But what it has to do with my simple task of dynamic update of the application screen? Therefore, my word "nonsense" should be applied to THIS situation ONLY and should NOT be used in any other context. Again, I did not try to offend anybody. The "best" language/tool/browser/etc. is the one you know. For example, we all reading this post because we all love ColdFusion and think it is "the best". Want to learn an alternative point of view? Go to PHP or .NET forums. So, if you like jQuery, you comfortable with it, you totally trust and rely on it, could quickly produce desired results, or just because it is an internal standard of your company - USE IT. But don't tell me this how EVERYBODY should program, because "this is the best", "everybody use it", "this is a common standard", "it increases (??) the code quality", and so on, and so on. By the way, if people who created jQuery would think the same way, they would never created it in the first place, since it wasn't a "common standard" and not "everybody" used it. There are always attempts in the programming community (in its manager's part especially) to declare something "the last and only thing you need" to program and impose artificial "common standards". This never worked before and will never work in the future. Programming languages and libraries come and go. This is how it always was and this is how it always will be. I am not advocating for an anarchy. Computer science is a pretty good developed area of discrete math, and base principles must be observed at any cost. Unfortunately, these days many "programmers" never even heard about Turing (Alan Mathison), but freely make claims about "standards", "best languages", etc. My [private] point of view is that any "standard" and "common practice" must have a normal common sense behind. Using a thing that requires 300K (sorry 229K) of code to perform a task that requires a few lines of it, is beyond of my definition of "common sense". Sorry. If you look at the original post that started this thread, you will see the definition of the problem. My claim is that I can program this particular task without jQuery and results will be better. Objectively better, not because of questionable properties like "everybody", "best", "should use", "standard", etc., but because it will be faster, smaller, take less resources on client's computer, and because an author of the code can debug any possible error, not asking somebody else for help. If the original problem would be how to program a fancy-shmancy Web-site that never "sleeps", doesn't let me freely move cursor on the screen without popping or moving something that I have to constantly kill, that dims my screen every 2 minutes and asks "Can we help you?" or "Call us", and provides additional annoying "services", then "YES" I would use jQuery, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life to program this, and because, obviously, nobody cares about the performance on such sites. Speaking about "common standards and trends" - hate this thing, I would recommend to look at CSS. I myself didn't use it too much, always relying on a Web designer, but now I use it and program more and more. For example, look here: http://www.cssplay.co.uk Ask yourself how much JS code you have (possibly, via jQuery) to support something that does not need JS at all? Good luck to everybody making living during these strange times using jQuery or without it... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:344717 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
