Builders of Ruby on Rails, the Web development framework that has been around for more than 12 years, have removed the popular jQuery JavaScript library from the default Rails stack in favor of a Ruby gem using vanilla JavaScript.
Thus, jQuery is not a Rails dependency anymore. The gem, rails-ujs, was created by developer Dangyi Liu as part of the Google Summer of Code event.
Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson said that jQuery simply is not as critical for Rails as it used to be. “JQuery was used to pave over differences in browsers that no longer exist to anywhere near the same degree any more,” he noted. “Rails-ujs just uses regular JavaScript for a built-in features in Rails we have that rely on JavaScript.”
Rails has a number of features, like data-confirm (which asks users to confirm an action before they complete it), that use JavaScript under the hood. A pull request has been filed in GitHub to remove jquery-rails from new applications and provide rails-ujs through Action View.
For years, jQuery has been a staple of the Web, handling such tasks as HTML, document traversal and manipulation, and event handling. It’s used by 96.4% of websites whose library is known, according to W3techs, which surveys usage of Web technologies.
Rails, meanwhile, has been seen as having lost some steam itself in favour of technologies such as Node.js. and Angular.js. The current release is Rails 5.0.0.1.
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