A hilarious blog post by @jjperezaguinaga entitled “How it feels to learn Javascript in 2016” has sparked quite a bit of discussion.
In the same vein I’d like to offer:
Hey, I got this new web project, but to be honest I haven’t coded much web in a few years and I’ve heard the landscape changed a bit. You are the most up-to date web dev around here right?
-Nope. I’m just an old web dev guy, but I do have a library I use for front end stuff
Cool. I need to create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table, and update it if anything changes in the server. I was thinking maybe using jQuery to fetch and display the data?
-Ah, it’s easier than that now. You can just use HTML and a few intercooler.js attributes instead of JSON
Oh, OK. What’s intercooler.js?
-A library built on top of jQuery that lets you hook AJAX requests into your DOM with HTML attributes.
That sounds neat. Can I use intercooler.js to display data from the server?
-Yep. Just return bits of HTML from your end points.
Wait, HTML? Just like normal web requests?
-Yep.
What’s wrong with HTML?
-Nothing, man. HTML is great. Use it.
Right. OK, so how do I install it?
-Just include it along with jQuery, the usual way.
Oh, jQuery! I can still use that?
-Of course, man.
But I need to update this data if anything changes on the server.
-Sounds like you might want to use the ic-poll attribute.
Huh. OK. Anything else?
-Nah, man. Docs are here. Pretty much everything you used to know about webdev still applies, just use bits of HTML rather than whole documents. Oh, also, there is an official music to program in intercooler.js with, if you are interested.
Umm… OK. Thanks?
-Yep. Cheers.
Carson / @carson_gross