Podcast 289: React, jQuery, Vue: what’s your favorite flavor of vanilla JS?
The conversation in this week’s episode was inspired by a blog and video from Chris Ferdinandi. He talked about converting jQuery plugins and Vue components into vanilla JS, and recording himself in the process. He also tried this conversion with a React demo app. While discussing all the new things one can do with the web, we ended up discussing a fundamental question: What is the difference between a language and a framework?
You can find Ferdinandi’s post and video here.
12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked: What is the difference between a framework and a library?
FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. “When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the flow. It provides some places for you to plug in your code, but it calls the code you plugged in as needed.”
There was no Lifeboat badge to call out this week, so we honored a Lifejacket winner instead. Shout out to Andreas for answering the queston: Are byte arrays initialised to zero in Java?
Tags: javascript, jQuery, vanilla js, vanillajs, vue
2 Comments
I think frameworks are great particularly in a team environment. I usually work on web projects on my own and I think any web developer should understand javascript at some level because at some point you are going to have to troubleshoot the generated javascript.
I am not sure if I would classify jQuery as a framework because its more of a thin abstraction to javascript. Maybe its a semi-framework like Blade is a half-vampire.
I personally don’t like using frameworks like React, Angular and VueJS(server side) due to the amount of node packages involved. It can make for a dependency nightmare if a support node package is updated and breaks something.
jQuery. Which is not a framework and when used right, it keeps things clean and simple. Why reinvent the wheel?