I use jquery all the time and couldn’t build a great website without it. But I’m learning to really dislike jquery-ui.
On applications that I’ve seen use jquery-ui, I feel that there’s too much javascript in the client. I’ve also seen situations where people attach jquery code to jquery-ui widgets that results in multiple events firing when a user clicks a button.
Moreover, I feel like almost all the features you get with jquery-ui you can build with plain divs and showing/hiding/animating elements using plain jquery.
In the end, I think it results in too much going on in the browser, is difficult to automate testing for, is harder to debug and really isn’t needed that often anyway.
Am I wrong?
I think there are many who would agree testability (particularly in a cross-browser manner) is a real problem.
With regards to it being too much – there are other JS libraries and frameworks that are usable in the place of jquery-ui.
If anybody has any recommended frameworks they consider “lighter” than jquery-ui that provide similar widgets, I’d love to hear about them and will note them here.
It’s important to remember that jquery-ui and jquery are split for a reason. Jquery-ui gives you lots of nice little widgets which aim to satisfy a bunch of common use cases. Jquery exists to do what it does better than any other library I’ve seen: match and manipulate the DOM.