Angular and JQuery. Jquery and angularjs.

Is it good to combine them? bad? evil but practical?

So, basically, if javascript is “the essembly of the web”, JQuery is probably those nasty GOTOs. Powerful, but nasty…

Here are some best practices for  JQuery inside an angular app.

Do it only inside directives

Best to do it inside the link function.

Use jqLite

Never use the $('#myId') syntax. It’s messy and buggy.

Take a look at this:

Well, first, this is obviously a bug: if you’de try to use more that one instance of this directive, it won’t work, since the selector will apply only to the first element.

Second, imagin a complex DOM, with a lot of these little directives. In every jquery selector, we scan the whole DOM, and for what?

TL;DR

This is good because:

• The selector runs only on this element - better performance.
• It’s easy to keep track on all special selectors (mainly id), since the selector is in the same file as the id.
• You don’t depend directly on JQuery - less dependencies.