You might not need jQuery…

I’ve heard about this before, sure. It’s kind of de rigueur these days to trash jQuery, or at least look down on people that use it. It’s pretty practical, though, and in my experience, almost every project still includes it. So I never learned how to not use it.

Recently, though, I decided to give it a shot. I wrote up some stuff in jQuery, and thought maybe I could at least write the slow parts (loops?) in plain js to see if it’s speedier.

What I learned, though, was that it’s easier than I thought to do all the things jQuery does in plain js.

I discovered a few cool resources that made this easier.

• PlainJS
• jQuery to Vanilla JS

Basically, I just walked through each section of my jQuery code, looked up the Plain JS equivalent, and replaced it. Sometimes it was a little wonky, but I managed to work through it. Plus, now I understand more of what’s going on under the covers.