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JavaScript

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,254 Points
Posted by Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,254 Points

Discussion: AJAX with jQuery. Yay or Nay?

I've been enjoying working with AJAX over the past few days. That said, it was a little daunting.

I can probably commit this to the brain:

var url = "/scriptlocation.php"
var data = {
     firstName: "Dave", 
     lastName: "McFarland"
}; 

var callback = function(response) {
};

$.get(url, data, callback);

But not this:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
     if(xhr.readyState === 4) {
          if (xhr.status === 200) {
               document.getElementById('ajax').innerHTML = xhr.responseText;
          } else if (xhr.status == 404) {

          } else if (xhr.status == 500) {

          }
     }

}

};

So I was blown away when I watched the first of the Stage 3 videos (AJAX Concepts) which talks about how jQuery makes an AJAX request so much simpler. Woohoo, simpler code for us all.

My question is, is it worth is learning to make AJAX Requests in pure JavaScript when jQuery takes care of the legroom for us?

Is it a detriment or a sign of weakness somehow if we do?

2 Answers

Roger Lüchinger
Roger Lüchinger
11,403 Points
Roger Lüchinger
Roger Lüchinger
11,403 Points

I think what counts is the solution, and not how you got there. So if I have a choice, I will always go for the easier solution and not try it the hard way. jQuery is amazing and I don't see any reason not to use it – there are still enough other things to learn.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

There's no agreement on this. If you google vanilla javascript you will find a lot of people arguing for doing things without JavaScript. One really good reason is to understand how JavaScript works.