jQuery UI

[Dani]

For as awesome and popular as jQuery is, why is jQuery UI so buggy and poorly maintained? Frustrated

[rproffitt]

I hear that and decided to head to https://jqueryui.com/ to read why this is. Right there, at the top is a great reason why it's the way it is.

jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.

I don't know what you read into that but to me this means that many contributed and may be nothing more than a collection of things folk have written over the years.

Now I can't guess if you are using one of the items there or buidling your own jQuery item. I see they do have a bug report system but my bet is it's for jQuery and not something that someone contributed.

https://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticketgraph didn't inspire confidence as ticket counts appear to be rising over time.

[gentlemedia]

I also thiink jQueryUI is dying slowly. If you want to rely on third party integrations then better go to a payed alternative such as KendoUI or even the free Dojo UI library. It looks like the latter has still an active userbase, update cycle and support.

[Dani]

rproffitt, that's my point exactly. jQueryUI is buggy and not well maintained. However, it's wholly owned by jQuery Foundation, and they don't put their name on much. If they choose to be associated with this plugin library and none others, why not make sure it represents them well?

Thinking back, jQuery in the very beginning used to have a plugins directory. I think jQuery UI might have started as a curated collection of some of the best plugins from the directory, when the directory was removed because it was unmaintainable.

[rproffitt]

@Dani. That's sad. You write they dumped the curated content and didn't update the top page to reflect the move away from curation.

Ouch. The worst find was that bug or ticket count. It is rising, not falling. Time to reach out to them directly about this or file your bug report. I didn't know about Dojo so this was nice to read about alternatives.

[Dani]

Time to reach out to them directly about this or file your bug report.

I actually used to use jQuery UI quite a bit a long while ago, but now the only thing I use it for is the autocomplete dropdown (which powers our search, etc.)

It just strikes me as unmaintained and overall buggy, and I'm not really too inclined to submit a bug report since I highly doubt it will be fixed up in a jiffy. ... Which is all perfectly fine except that it strikes me as odd that it's also the only plugin library I know of owned by the jQuery Foundation, and the only one they officially put their name behind. For how insanely popular jQuery is, I'm surprised.

[Dani]

Gentlemedia,

Do you think jQuery is dying or just jQueryUI?

[rproffitt]

Here's my thought on dying, etc.

1. https://github.com/jquery/jquery/graphs/contributors gives me a snapshot of develments of jQuery. It looks like a mature system. The open bugs at another page is only 69 with many being marked as need more info and other states.

This is in sharp contrast to jQueryUI's 1200 plus open bug count and the upward trend. This is a sign of the developers either not bearing down on the bugs or closing those that are Roseannadanna 's.

1. The attraction is there for jQueryUI so dying isn't what I'd call it. Just a project in need of some fresh blood.

[gentlemedia]

I meant jQueryUI and ok... dying is a big word, but since the rise of Bootstrap and the likes that also come with JavaScript widgets, I believe the popularity of it is quite low compared to how it was. And there're so many other alternatives as well.