Ask HN: What's the best way to build Javascript widgets today?

3 points by jasongullickson 13 years ago | 4 comments

We're working on moving our site from a straight-up ROR app to hypermedia API on the back-end (still running on Rails) and Javascript/HTML5 on the front.

I've used everything from raw Javascript to jQuery to Dojo to build client-side components against a REST API before, and I'm comfortable with going that direction, but I'm asking the community here if something has come along that supersedes these tools for this sort of application?

In particular we want to develop a modular set of controls that can operate in a stand-alone fashion, composed only of client-side code but can also be combined and hosted in existing Rails-served pages as well as static HTML.

Thoughts?

justinf 13 years ago |

JQuery still seems to be king at the moment. There's some pushback against it in this new world of a mobile web since it adds size to low-bandwidth pages, but there doesn't seem to be a risk that it'll be dethroned any time soon.

If I were looking to make a portable and semi-futureproof toolkit right now, I'd use jQuery as a base, but limit myself to some big features, like dom queries, events, and ajax. Then I'd make sure I had it sandboxed inside all my code via anonymous functions (function($) { /* my code */ })(jQuery); so I could swap in a lighter replacement later on without a headache.

tjholowaychuk 13 years ago | |

jquery is codesmell of all codesmells

tjholowaychuk 13 years ago |

Check out https://github.com/component

dotborg 13 years ago |

Moving stuff into CSS seems to be a good direction. i.e. you don't have to code shadows/animations/etc. in JS anymore.