When comparing jQuery Mobile vs UiKit, the Slant community recommends UiKit for most people. In the question“What are the best frontend frameworks?” UiKit is ranked 6th while jQuery Mobile is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose UiKit is:
The code is pretty clean and follows well-defined conventions.
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Pros
Pro Resources
With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle.
Pro ThemeRoller
An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users can import a current theme, make changes, and export the theme back to the app for integration.
Pro Download Builder
To optimize application development jQuery Mobile provides a tool to allow the user to customize the framework. It contains the ability to pick and choose which modules to include and then bundles the framework so it contains only what is needed.
Pro Well architected
The code is pretty clean and follows well-defined conventions.
Pro Ready to use themes available
There are plenty of ready to use themes available from the official website. You can choose the theme that you want to use from the dropdown menu and then download the CSS, LESS or SASS file for that theme to use for the website.
Pro Easy to use.
When using UIKit classes, it is used with the ui- prefix which is very good. Components are explained straight-forward.
Pro Built-in animation capabilities
UiKit has some built-in animation features which can be used to animate various components.
Pro Great style even out of the box
UiKit has a pretty good and clean style even out of the box without any customization needed.
Pro Very customizable
UiKit's rather minimal style can be easily customizable to create an entirely new look to fit the needs of the designer.
Pro Extremely modular
Every aspect of the framework is designed to be modular, this way designers can easily choose which components to add to their stylesheet without risking to damage the overall style.
Cons
Con The project is practically abandoned
The last release was in 2014. Samsung Tizen Advanced UI (TAU), for example, was started with JQuery, but it was forked off and completely rebuilt from scratch with jQuery concepts but without JQuery dependency itself.
Con Clunky and slow
Con No MVC support
There is no included MVC support in jQuery Mobile. It is possible to achieve this, however, using other frameworks such as BackboneJS in combination with jQuery Mobile, but there are a few limitations. Specifically that MVC frameworks, such as BackboneJS or KnockoutJS, are not compatible with jQuery Mobile page routing.
Con Messy code classes
Nested classes become complicated to read to obtain desired result.
Con Not very popular
UiKit is not a very popular framework, especially compared to other options. As such it may be hard to find learning resources other than the official documentation or it may be more likely for development of UiKit to be dropped than for another more popular framework
Con Slow development
New features and updates trickle out over 6-12 month development cycles, bug fixes are more frequent but very slow and selective as well.
Con Pre-built starter templates are now behind a paywall
Easier to use Joomla! or Wordpress starter templates without paying money for it.
Con Closed development
Development is mostly done in-house and not publicly available.