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date-fns VS jQuery

Compare date-fns VS jQuery and see what are their differences

date-fns logo date-fns

date-fns provides the most comprehensive yet simple and consistent toolset for manipulating JavaScript dates in a browser & Node.js.

jQuery logo jQuery

The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.
  • date-fns Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-30
  • jQuery Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-22

date-fns features and specs

  • Lightweight
    date-fns is designed to be lightweight, with a modular structure that allows developers to only import the functions they need, reducing overall bundle size.
  • Modular
    The library is highly modular, which means you can include only the specific functionalities you need, leading to better optimization and faster load times for your applications.
  • Immutable
    date-fns functions operate in an immutable way, meaning they do not change the original date objects but return new date objects, avoiding potential side effects.
  • Comprehensive
    date-fns provides a comprehensive set of date-related functions, covering a wide range of use cases from simple date manipulation to complex date calculations.
  • Localization
    The library has built-in support for internationalization and localization, making it easier to format dates in various locales and languages.
  • Ease of Use
    With a consistent and straightforward API, date-fns is easy to learn and use, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced developers.
  • Well-maintained
    date-fns is actively maintained with frequent updates and a supportive community, ensuring it stays up-to-date with the latest JavaScript standards and practices.

Possible disadvantages of date-fns

  • Not as Rich as Moment.js
    Compared to Moment.js, date-fns lacks some of the more advanced date manipulation features and utilities, potentially requiring additional work for certain use cases.
  • Learning Curve
    While simpler than some alternatives, there is still a learning curve to fully understand and utilize the modular approach and various functions provided by date-fns.
  • No Time Zones Support
    Date-fns does not provide built-in support for time zones, which can be a limitation for applications that require robust time zone handling.
  • Function Overhead
    The functional approach, while flexible, can lead to a higher overhead in function calls compared to some object-oriented approaches, potentially impacting performance in heavily date-manipulation-centric applications.
  • Dependency Management
    Because of its modularity, managing imports and ensuring all necessary parts of the library are included can sometimes be cumbersome and error-prone.
  • Interoperability
    Interoperability with other date libraries is not always straightforward, and transitioning from libraries like Moment.js can require significant code changes.

jQuery features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    jQuery simplifies complex JavaScript tasks by providing easy-to-use methods, which can lead to shorter development times and cleaner code.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    jQuery handles many browser inconsistencies, ensuring that your code works seamlessly across different browsers without additional effort.
  • Large Community and Ecosystem
    There is a vast community of developers who contribute plugins, extensions, and provide support, making it easier to find solutions and enhance functionality.
  • Animation and Effects
    jQuery offers built-in methods for creating animations and effects, allowing developers to enhance the user interface with minimal code.
  • AJAX Simplification
    The library provides straightforward methods for making AJAX calls, which simplifies the process of loading data asynchronously.
  • Documentation and Learning Resources
    Extensive documentation and a plethora of tutorials are available, making it easier for developers to learn and troubleshoot.

Possible disadvantages of jQuery

  • Performance Overhead
    Using jQuery can add overhead to your application due to its file size and additional abstraction, which can impact performance, especially in resource-constrained environments.
  • Relevance
    With the advent of modern JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, and the improvements in native JavaScript (ES6+), the need for jQuery has decreased, making it less relevant in contemporary web development.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While basic usage is straightforward, mastering more advanced topics and optimizing performance can be challenging for newcomers.
  • Potential for Overuse
    Developers might rely too heavily on jQuery for tasks that can be efficiently handled by native JavaScript, leading to bloated codebases.
  • Maintenance and Legacy Code
    Projects heavily reliant on jQuery may face maintenance challenges as modern frameworks and practices evolve, requiring significant refactoring effort if transitioning away from jQuery.
  • Security
    Older jQuery versions have known security vulnerabilities, and continuing to use outdated versions can pose security risks. Regular updates are necessary to mitigate this issue.

Analysis of date-fns

Overall verdict

  • Yes, date-fns is a good choice for date manipulation in JavaScript applications. It is efficient, lightweight, and well-maintained, making it suitable for both small and large projects.

Why this product is good

  • Date-fns is considered a good library because it offers over 200 functions for manipulating JavaScript dates in a consistent and reliable manner. It focuses on immutability and provides a functional approach to date manipulation, which can help avoid common pitfalls associated with mutable objects. It's also modular, allowing developers to include only the functions they need, reducing the overall bundle size.

Recommended for

  • Developers seeking a lightweight, modular date library.
  • Projects where tree-shaking capabilities are important to reduce bundle size.
  • Teams that prefer a functional programming approach to date manipulation.
  • Applications needing comprehensive date manipulation capabilities without the overhead of larger libraries like Moment.js.

Analysis of jQuery

Overall verdict

  • jQuery is good for simplifying and speeding up certain JavaScript tasks, particularly in projects that need to support older browsers or if you are maintaining legacy code. However, for modern web development, many of its features are now part of the JavaScript standard, diminishing its necessity.

Why this product is good

  • jQuery has been popular due to its simplicity and ease of use, providing an easier way to work with HTML document traversal, event handling, and animations. It abstracts browser differences and offers a concise API for common JavaScript operations.

Recommended for

  • Developers maintaining or updating legacy projects that already use jQuery.
  • Projects that require compatibility with older browsers not supported by modern JavaScript features.
  • Beginners learning JavaScript concepts as an additional tool to practice DOM manipulation and event handling.

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jQuery videos

Quick jQuery Review

More videos:

  • Review - jQuery vs Vue, React and Angular
  • Review - Front-End Development, HTML & CSS, Javascript & jQuery by Jon Duckett | Book Review
  • Review - The Legend of jQuery in 100 Seconds
  • Review - â­•The one book I regret not having as a beginning web developer || Jon Duckett JavaScript & jQuery

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to date-fns and jQuery)
Javascript UI Libraries
18 18%
82% 82
Development Tools
0 0%
100% 100
JS Library
100 100%
0% 0
Web Frameworks
100 100%
0% 0

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare date-fns and jQuery

date-fns Reviews

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jQuery Reviews

Top 20 Javascript Libraries
jQuery dramatically simplifies JS programming and is easy to learn and use. It is highly extensible and makes web pages load faster. jQuery wraps up a lot of standard functions making the job of the developer easy. A JS code of several lines could be just a method to be called in jQuery. It also has many plugins to perform different tasks. Some of the features of jQuery are...
Source: hackr.io
Top 15 jQuery Alternatives To Know
The world is full of newer technologies and there are alternatives available for all of them. jQuery is no different. The above-mentioned technologies can be a good alternative to jQuery though jQuery itself has a loyal user base of its own. Overall, it depends upon the organizational skills, requirements, budget, and objective, based on which stakeholders can take a call on...
Best Javascript libraries to use in 2021
jQuery has been in the development scene for a long time and has been the unprecedented king for webpage dev. It is one of the most common libraries used throughout the world, with more than 50% of websites using jQuery for their functioning. jQuery is a library used majorly for Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation. The DOM is a tree-like structure that represents all...
Source: codersera.com

Social recommendations and mentions

jQuery might be a bit more popular than date-fns. We know about 102 links to it since March 2021 and only 77 links to date-fns. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

date-fns mentions (77)

  • Supporting RTL language layout in your web application
    You can also choose to use a library like date-fns to handle date and time localization. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Say Goodbye to JavaScript’s DST Date Confusion
    These issues can also occur in date-time libraries such as moment.js, date-fns, Day.js, and luxon. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Day 8: D-8 🎱
    Do you know how many days left till Christmas? Well this little handy library certainly does! - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Release Radar · September 2024: Major updates from the open source community
    JavaScript seems to be the flavour of the month, and here's another JavaScript project for you. date-fns provides the most comprehensive and consistent toolset for manipulating JavaScript dates in a browser & Node.js. The latest version comes ten years after the very first release. There are no breaking changes in the release, and it comes with added time zone support, meaning you can select which time zone to... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Date Formatting: Carbon, date-fns, and Vanilla JS
    Working with dates and times is an essential part of web development. Whether you're building a blog, an e-commerce site, or a personal project, handling and formatting dates correctly can greatly enhance user experience. In this blog, we'll explore date formatting using three different methods: Carbon (PHP), date-fns (JavaScript), and Vanilla JS Date. We'll provide examples for each to help you understand how to... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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jQuery mentions (102)

  • The Unchaining: My Personal Journey Graduating from jQuery to Modern JavaScript
    When I was building a quick frontend to the LLM game, I used jQuery to quickly whip out a prototype. Only after I was happy with it, I ported the code to the modern DOM API. As a result, I totally removed the dependency on jQuery. This whole experience makes me wonder, do people still use jQuery, in this age of frontend engineering? I took some time over the weekend to port one of my old jQuery plugins. This is... - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
  • This One jQuery Mistake Froze Our Web Page! Here's the Fix You Need to Know
    Whenever the number of items increased, the browser became slow, sometimes even unresponsive. At first, we thought it was a server issue or maybe too much data. But no — the problem was hiding inside a small line of jQuery. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Is jQuery Dead?
    Ah, jQuery — the library that powered a generation of web apps. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Understanding Awaitables: Coroutines, Tasks, and Futures in Python
    Then we have callbacks, which were popularized by AJAX calls. Back then, with jQuery, we could define handlers to deal with both success or failure cases. For instance, let's say we want to fetch the HTML markup of this blog (skipping error failure callback for brevity), we do. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • the entire history of JavaScript, i guess
    One of them is JQuery created by John Resig. The library addresses extremely-frustrating issues related to cross-browser compatibility that existed at the time. To this day, it remains the most widely used JavaScript library in terms of actual page loads. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing date-fns and jQuery, you can also consider the following products

Moment.js - Parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates in JavaScript

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Day.js - 2kB JavaScript date utility library

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.

Luxon - Application and Data, Libraries, and Javascript Utilities & Libraries

OpenSSL - OpenSSL is a free and open source software cryptography library that implements both the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, which are primarily used to provide secure communications between web browsers and …