The King is dead. Long live the King!

I love jQuery.

Its minimalism, quality and consistency allowed me to do anything with a few lines of code (often just a single one).

It brought a clean syntax to an inconsistent language.

It offered an abstraction over incompatible browsers.

It was solid. It was freaking fast.

It made me feel like a powerful hacker.

And I loved that a 12 year old kid could teach people how to use it.

Its bright future was not obvious at the start. Around the time it was born, there were several other competing libraries: Dojo, Prototype, Mootools, YUI.

But jQuery kicked everyone’s ass.

Now 10 years have passed, and we need more power.

Even John Resig, the father of jQuery, uses React

Enter React.

It’s minimalist. It has high quality. It’s consistent.

It’s easy to learn and reason about.

It enables a clean way to break your interface into smaller isolated blocks.

It brings HTML and JavaScript closer together.

It’s solid. It’s freaking fast.

Six year olds are learning it.

Once I made the effort to change my mindset (and it took a bit), the jQuery way started to look a bit too hackish.

Now React makes me feel like a brilliant UI architect.

There are several other frameworks out there: Angular, Ember, Knockout, Backbone.

Forget them all. React, following jQuery’s minimalist footsteps, is kicking everyone’s ass.

I loved jQuery. Now I love React.

The King is dead. Long live the King!

Editor’s Note: Tiago Simões believes in making development faster for existing developers, while making it possible for everyone else. That’s his job at OutSystems R&D.