15 jQuery Alternatives To Know
15 jQuery Alternatives To Know
A popular JavaScript library with a focused objective – ‘write less, do more’, jQuery has been a popular face for 15+ years. As a cross-browser library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML, it is a reusable piece of code that can be utilized more with JavaScript. It has been a small, quick, and feature-heavy library that is written in JavaScript. The main purpose of jQuery has been to facilitate developers to use JavaScript easily on websites. Its simplistic API helps it work seamlessly across diverse browsers.
Popular companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, Udemy, and many more have been leveraging the potential of jQuery.
What Is jQuery?
jQuery is a free, open-source software library that makes use of the MIT license. It exhibits a perfect combination of being versatile and extensible, altering the way developers use JavaScript.
It has been a popular name in the web world since it is light weighted as compared to JavaScript and easy to grasp and implement. jQuery pages load in a quick manner.
It is a well-known JS library that is specially designed to cater to the following features:
Key Features:
- HTML, DOM, and CSS manipulation
- DOM element selection
- HTML event methods
- AJAX
- Utilities and event handling
- Effects and animations
What Is jQuery Used For?
It is majorly used by web developers to add on all extra functionalities to their websites. As one of the most established JavaScript libraries to process HTML document traversal and manipulation easily, jQuery has been winning the hearts of developers.
Through this writeup, we are trying to lay down other well-known jQuery alternatives that can fulfill your requirements just in case you don’t need all the available APIs that are available with jQuery.
Popular jQuery Alternatives
- Cash
- Zepto
- Syncfusion Essential JS2
- UmbrellaJS
- jQuery Slim
- JavaScript
- ReactJS
- ExtJS
- Bootstrap
- AngularJS
- Vue.js
- Chibi JS
- Flux
- MooTools
- D3.js
Here is an overview of each jQuery Alternative and reasons for their popularity:
Cash:
Cash is a popular plug-in with good support for all modern browsers over IE10+. With a syntax like jQuery, it possesses all fundamental features that would be needed and manipulates the DOM taking up 32KB f space. It offers support for TypeScript types, namespaced events, and modern builds.
It has a very small file size, around 8KB, which is one of its key attractions. It depends completely on modern JavaScript standards to fulfill useful jQuery features. It has a simple syntax since its leverages the functional JavaScript library and performs event handling and DOM manipulation with ease.
Zepto:
Zepto is a known, open-source, software library with a large jQuery compatible API. These APIs offer maximum coverage to the jQuery equivalents. The main objective is to have a modular library that can offer fast download and execution through flexible APIs. Zepto is released under the MIT license.
Developers who are known to jQuery can easily grasp Zepto. The size of the APIs is quite less as compared to jQuery and hence is a preferred alternative to jQuery, also because of its fast execution. It also has extensive support for all major browsers and IE10 + versions. It has a modular assembly so that you can resize it according to the needs of modules.
Syncfusion Essential JS2:
Syncfusion Essential JS2 is a modernized JavaScript UI controls library that is written in TypeScript. Its salient features speak of its lightweight nature, modular library, and lower overhead, for enhancing web applications. It supports other frameworks like Vue, Angular, React, etc.
It has a strong focus on performance and has a responsive library that works well with mobile devices too. It has no external dependencies. It has many HTML5 JavaScript components to create modern-day web applications. It possesses all major UI controls that are needed to create business-centric applications having grids, charts, scheduler, etc.
UmbrellaJS:
As one of the major alternatives to jQuery, UmbrellaJS has been standing high. Here, you can utilize native JavaScript methods on the Umbrella selectors. The syntax is like jQuery except for a few changes. The file size is relatively smaller and hence turns out lighter. It is limited to events, AJAX, and DOM manipulation.
It is easy to use, a comprehensive package, and free under the MIT license. It is around 3 KB in size and offers a great loading speed. It works perfectly fine on mobile devices also. As a tiny library, UmbrellaJS is well documented and intuitive. It promotes reusable code components and hence a boon to developers.
jQuery Slim:
As the name suggests, jQuery Slim is an effective subset of the jQuery library that does not have the AJAX and effects modules to lessen the overall sizing. This is for users who don’t wish to leave the jQuery family yet need a reduction in size. If developers are sure not to use AJAX and effects modules, this is the right choice.
jQuery Slim is considered good when it comes to prototyping and creating animation projects. As a slimmer version of jQuery, apart from AJAX and effects modules, it also does not carry deprecated code. It is a customized build of jQuery specially designed to meet the requirements of having a smaller-sized version.
JavaScript:
Native JavaScript is one of the most common alternatives to jQuery. JavaScript has been dominant ever since because of its salient features like platform independence, greater control, simplistic client-side calculations, generation of HTML content, arrow functions, detection of browsers and OS, etc.
Though jQuery is concise and does not need too much coding, JavaScript turns out faster for DOM manipulation and hence turns away the overhead that must be carried by jQuery users. JavaScript is client-side and hence resides in the browser scripting language. It needs a little extra code to be written for cross-browser compatibility.
ReactJS:
ReactJS is a powerful JavaScript library to create user interfaces. Developers can design easy views at each stage in the application and there is regular update and rendering for the actual components whenever there is any data alteration. It is component-driven and creates encapsulated components that manage their own state.
ReactJS works on the principle of learn once, write anywhere. Newer features can be developed in React without any code rewriting. It gels well with most peer technologies and showcases server-side rendering, abstraction, expressivity, sensible use of a component model, composition, etc.
AngularJS:
Powered by Google, AngularJS has been a popular JavaScript-based, open-source framework that is completely extensible. It gels well with other libraries. AngularJS solutions have been serving multiple domains like IoT, eCommerce, business analytics, API development, social network sites, website apps with CMS, etc.
AngularJS has been a developer’s delight because of its key features like quick development, agile approach, reusability, quality development, plug and play components, two-way data binding, simplistic coding, HTML templates, etc. It is ideal for developing single-page applications and is supported by a great community of developers and organizations.
Vue.js:
A progressive JavaScript framework, Vue.js is considered a good alternative to jQuery. It is an open-source, MVVM, front-end JS framework that is considered ideal to create user interfaces and single-page apps. It is also considered good for web interfaces, desktop, and mobile app development.
Vue.js is an approachable, versatile, and performant framework that showcases features like virtual DOM, data binding, event handling, animation, transition, components, directives, routing, watchers, Vue-CLI, etc. It has a powerful library and is faster than most of its peers. It offers a good amount of flexibility that lets developers write the template in HTML, JS using virtual nodes.
ExtJS:
ExtJS, as the name suggests, stands for Extended JavaScript. As an offering from Sencha, it depends on YahooUserInterface. ExtJS helps in creating data intensified HTML5 apps with JavaScript. It consists of a huge collection of customizable and high-performance widgets that assist in creating cross-platform mobile and web apps, for any type of modernized device.
ExtJS has good support from major browsers like Chrome, FF, IE6+, Safari, etc. and it possesses many well-tested and good performance UI components. It is centered on MVC/MVVM architecture. The Sencha community offers hundreds of user extensions. The library offers features like the grid, pivot grid, exporter, charts, layouts, D2 adapters, etc.
Bootstrap:
Bootstrap is a highly popular HTML, CSS, JS framework to create responsive, mobile-first applications on the web. It is an open-source technology is fast and develops responsive sites. As a front-end framework, Bootstrap features responsive grids, powerful JS plug-ins, Sass variables, mixins, etc.
It consists of CSS and JS-based design templates that are utilized for forms, buttons, typography, navigation, etc. Salient features of Bootstrap include light weighted, easy customization, easy to learn, LESS and CSS files, drop-down components, customized templates, responsive utility classes, structure, and styles, etc.
Chibi JS:
Chibi JS is yet another good alternative to jQuery especially when it comes to having a library with a smaller size. Even with its tiny size, this technology possesses almost all major features that jQuery has. It has good support for all modern-day browsers. It does not offer animation support.
Since it is tiny in size, it shows faster execution as compared to other libraries. Chibi JS is a tiny, JavaScript micro-library that supports CSS transitions. It is approximately 7KB in size and stays in line with single-page web applications. This saves an additional HTTP request also.
Flux:
Flux is an application architecture that Facebook has been using, for creating client-side web applications and user interfaces. It is a data flow application architecture that is implementable by any programming language. The main components of Flux are mainly responsible for close coordination between applications.
Action and action creators, dispatcher, stores, and controller views – the key components have their individual set of roles and responsibilities, put together to create the best of the user interface, creating harmony amidst components. The integrity and validity of the application state are well ensured with controlling of events.
MooTools:
MooTools is a compact JavaScript framework that facilitates developers to select their own customized components. It consists of utility functions that range from medium to advanced level of JavaScript content. It is light weighted, and its logical APIs promote flexible coding ways.
It has good documentation support and practices object-oriented methodology. It offers DOM enhancements that help developers with the addition, modification, and deletion of DOM elements. MooTools also has the element storage component. It is free, open-source, and available under the MIT license.
D3.js:
D3.js represents Data-Driven Documents and is a JavaScript library to manipulate documents based on data. It assists in bringing data to life with the help of HTML, CSS, and SVG. It showcases features such as powerful visualization, data-driven approach to DOM manipulation, support for modern browsers, focuses on web standards, etc.
D3.js is highly flexible, easy to use, and fast in performance. It supports large datasets and declarative programming standards. There is code reusability and a large variety of curve-generating functions. It has a data association to a single element or group of elements in the HTML page.
As We Wrap Up
The world is full of newer technologies and there are alternatives available for all of them. jQuery is no different. The above-mentioned technologies can be a good alternative to jQuery though jQuery itself has a loyal user base of its own. Overall, it depends upon the organizational skills, requirements, budget, and objective, based on which stakeholders can take a call on which technology to select.