JQuery vs Ractive.js
When comparing JQuery vs Ractive.js, the Slant community recommends Ractive.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript libraries for building a UI?” Ractive.js is ranked 7th while JQuery is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Ractive.js is:
Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy to use
Much easier to use than traditional JavaScript. Allows a lot of features and function to be completed with less lines of code.
Pro Cross-browser support
jQuery works on all modern browsers, although there may be some issues with old versions of each browser.
Pro Strong community
The open source community has really embraced jQuery and it has many readily available plugins to help speed up the development process. In addition to this, it has great documentation and tutorials
Pro Supports a true templating language
Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages.
Pro Makes it possible to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion
Ractive has a concept of proxy events, which translate a user action (e.g. a mouseclick) defined via an event directive into an intention (e.g. 'select this option'). This allows you to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion.on-click='activate'
with arguments:on-click = 'activate: {{a}}, {{b}}'
It's activate
(and not click
, nor your function name) that is the name of the handler event that will be fired for any registered handlers created viaractive.on('activate', your_handler)
ractive.on('activate', your_another_handler)
Of course, Ractive also supports method calls like on-click='toggle(foo
)'
Pro Two-way binding configuration
Two-way binding can be turned off by those that are concerned it may be a source of bugs.
Pro Step by step tutorial
They have a great interactive tutorial which makes the learning process easy peasy. You will get into it within a couple of minutes.
Pro Virtual DOM
Instead of relying on the DOM, Ractive implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.
Cons
Con It is not a framework, but rather a library.
Frameworks allow you to handle page routing, authentication, and services. jQuery is not a framework, but rather a library of DOM tools for websites.
e.g.: You cannot write page routing logic within jQuery.
Con Script download
As opposed to just using raw JavaScript, users will (automatically) download the jQuery script to their local computers in order for it to work. This results in more overhead on the initial page visit, regardless of how lightweight the framework is.
Con Ractive's two way binding can be a source of bugs
Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Ractive model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed.
This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code.
However, this is the default behaviour which can be changed to have one-way data binding.