I challenge anyone to use jQuery to build a SPA and not re-invent backbone (poorly or otherwise).

I built a simple site recently and one complex page ended up with shitty recreations of backbone Model and View.. and never knew until a colleague reviewed my code and suggested I look those up.

I recently did exactly this and it wasn't that bad. It's not that I couldn't use Backbone, I decided not to because I didn't see the point in introducing yet another library when all I really needed to do was bind inputs to a model, which I did in about 5 lines of terse jQuery. Besides, I had custom widgets that wouldn't have benefited from Backbone anyway and would have required customization anyway. I think judicious use of libraries is ok, but tbe more elite among us tend to become libray snobs and shame people for not doing things the "right" way.

> there are plenty of SPA which use jquery (or even vanilla JS) for their DOM manipulation.

I've seen jQuery included in VueJS/react/ng2 for a specific complex plugin, and I've seen it for a few simple DOM manipulations where there was no reason for kQuery to do it instead of the framework, but is there actually a paradigm for jQuery being the root framework in an SPA? I've looked for jQuery SPA and found nothing. Does a jQuery SPA framework actually exist or are you talking about lots of homemade frameworks that use jQuery?

Jquery solved a problem where building websites was a pain. Trying to listen to an event? Manipulate the dom? All painful.

But the thing is we aren’t really building websites anymore. We are building web applications. And jquery just plain sucks for that.