Bootstrap, Icons and jQuery

[ceford]

It looks like the Atum admin template will soon switch to Bootstrap 5 instead of Bootstrap 4. I have been building my own special purpose Site template also switching to Bootstrap 5. Amongst other things I am pondering whether to use Bootstrap Icons rather than Fontawsome Icons, and dropping jQuery in favour of vanilla Javascript. Bootstrap 5 no longer uses jQuery, although it does support its use, and my impression is that jQuery is falling out of favour. Does anyone have opinions on these matters? I need to evolve!

[JurajB]

I suggest extending J4 system dashboard with dependencies loader with list updates options like jsx react jquery vue etc.

[sozzled]

It looks like the Atum admin template will soon switch to Bootstrap 5 instead of Bootstrap 4 ... and dropping jQuery in favour of vanilla Javascript.

Interesting. Where did you read that? I wonder what implications this will have for how long it will take before J! 4 is released in some stable form?

Not that I particularly care if jQuery will disappear from the backend (although it may impact third-party backend template developers) but, given the hoopla that surrounded the original outline for J! 4 back in 2016-17, Bootstrap 4 and jQuery were cornerstone features for the way J! would be developed and it's surprising that the developers could be changing that objective, mid-stream as it were.

... my impression is that jQuery is falling out of favour. Does anyone have opinions on these matters?

The main attraction for me—as far as the choice of J! as a CMS is concerned—is that the interaction between the user and the website is carried out via a reliable Javascript-based cross-browser mechanism that handles the DOM differences that exist between different browsers on the market; in other words, not forcing people to use one particular browser or another. So, in that sense, I don't care how that mechanism is implemented ... whether it's via jQuery or something else.

Way back in the days of J! 1.0, there was a cross-browser Javascript library supplied with J! that handled the DOM. The project moved forward in J! 1.5/1.6/1.7/2.5 with Mootools. J! 3.x dropped Mootools for jQuery. That's only to say that J! has always provided a Javascript library out-of-the-box to accommodate different DOMs used by different browsers. That's not to say that people cannot add other Javascript libraries as they may choose or need (as long as people are aware that some Javascript function calls—used by third-party extensions, perhaps—may not co-operate well with similarly defined functions in other libraries and those conflicts may break their website(s)). We're well aware of how "something" in the extensions that people install on their website(s) cause things to crash.

It's my opinion, for what it's worth, that it would be better to use a Javascript library developed by a separate development team (jQuery is one such example) instead of going it alone and having to maintain a home-grown/"vanilla" one. Not that it matters, I think, because—if it's true that this is the way forward—the developers aren't interested in our views.