Having spent hours and hours trying to find to find my feet in the world of competing JS frameworks and gui libraries a friend said "Just search for 'declarative ajax' and click the second link". Good advice, because it led me to intercoolerjs. It's just so straightforward. Twenty or so minutes later I was back in emacs generating Django views because I knew, intuitively, what I needed to do to actually get things done.
It's hard to explain to people how quickly you can get working with it but something like:
<a href="#" ic-target="#datadiv" ic-get-from="/latest_data/">Get Data</a>
is basically pseudocode. I love it.I develop desktop software for Windows, but I'm also interested in the web development techs - although haven't done any real-life web apps, I have read a lot of docs about most of popular frameworks you can list here. The first framework that got me think "cool, it's natural and simple" is Angularjs 1, maybe because it's so similar to the good old Delphi's GUI framework called VCL (Visual Component Library - yes! Component!), but you all know the story - it's "killed" by angular 2 and the version 2 feels so complex and so over-engineering to me :P
Now intercooler.js gives me a feeling similar to the one when I first landed the angular 1 homepage - it's not the same of course, but I think both of them made me think "natural" and "simple".
Maybe you think, well, you are not a web dev, but trust me, I've writing software for a living for over a decades, I know the pain of a framework when being over-abstraction, over-engineering, or being bloated. KISS, is a rule that fits in all fields, I guess.
It's exactly the improvement on jQuery the OP asked for, and thus fits that mental model perfectly. It is also so logically designed it basically requires no documentation - I read the introduction and a handful of examples and thought, "shit of course it works this wasy" and could basically derive how every other feature mapped to its implementation in that moment.
Congratulations!
love this and thanks for sharing. your intro/docs page is very well written in that it progresses very well from simple examples to more intricate examples. very well done!
The only reason I probably wouldn't use it is that I'm happy with just using browser APIs directly for the small stuff.
I'll just say that the examples make intercooler.js seem much more complicated than it is, until you read closely enough to realize that most of the code is Mockjax and backend implementation. You'd do well to split the view into two parts: frontend source code and server-side source code.
http://intercoolerjs.org
Basically you use HTML attributes to drive AJAX requests, and render your HTML on the server side. (There are actually very good theoretical reasons for doing this[1][2].) It is built on top of jQuery and dovetails very nicely with it.
There are lots of examples here:
http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/index.html
And, again, if you are looking for simplicity in front end development, while still building a modern web application, I think it's a good option. There is no tool chain beyond what you currently use for web development.
[1] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html
[2] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...