Link, Rainer wrote:
Is learning jQuery really such a bad thing?
Personally, I'm a big fan of jQuery. But, still, if you don't want or
need to learn it for your site, the simplicity of iUI is nice. You can
use jQuery with iUI if you like, or if you are already familiar with
another framework you can use that framework with iUI without having to
include two frameworks.
I recently completed my first mobile web app designed for the iPhone. It's
been a great experience and I've learned a ton but some questions still linger
in my mind including, is jQuery a good idea for mobile web apps?
We use jQuery for all of our desktop web apps and I absolutely love it. But when I started out on my mobile project I decided not to use it (at first) because even minified it's still 56k and its main purpose, to mitigate variations across different browsers, doesn't apply to a site targeted solely at WebKit. But it really isn't a question of jQuery or no framework at all because the DOM is missing several features that you end up having to write yourself (and maintain and teach others on your team). Plus, code written using jQuery tends to be smaller, so these factors offset at least somewhat the initial download hit that you take. Add to that the productivity gains that you get using jQuery and I had to rethink my initial decision and ended up including jQuery in my iPhone project.
So I'm just curious - where did others fall out on this debate? Of course if
you're using jQTouch you also need jQuery, but is anyone out there using jQuery
with iui?
I've done it, but I usually factor jQuery out by the end of the
project. I've seen several other projects that have done it as well.
I get that iui contains a few helper functions for getting elements by class
name, etc, but these features pale in comparison to the power of jQuery, IMO.
iUI does not (and never will) attempt to provide the power of jQuery.
(I should note though, that querySelector(all) has been implemented on
the iPhone since 2.x and is very useful in iUI-based apps.) However, I
don't think iUI would be made much smaller by using jQuery instead of
native browser functions internally.
I've written a blog post about the design philosophy of iUI:
http://code.msgilligan.com/2009/09/iui-design-philosophy.html
As I say in the blog entry, this philosophy comes from iUI's creator,
Joe Hewitt, and from the community that grew up around it. I think it's
a good approach, though not ideally suited for every project, and am in
favor of keeping that same approach going forward. iUI 0.40 is focused
on an extension mechanism that will allow users/developers to add
whatever they need while keeping the core small and simple.
I would like iUI to be able to be used with multiple frameworks and if
there is ever an integration issue with a framework that can be resolved
by simple changes to the core iui.js file, please submit an issue to the
DB and we'll take a serious look at it.
-- Sean
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