intercooler/www/_posts/2016-10-5-how-it-feels-to-learn-intercooler-in-2016.md

Making AJAX as easy as anchor tags

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A hilarious blog post by [@jjperezaguinaga](https://twitter.com/jjperezaguinaga) entitled 
[“How it feels to learn Javascript in 2016”](https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f#.bc2f5n47k)
has sparked quite a bit of discussion.

In the same vein I'd like to offer:

### How it feels to learn intercooler.js in 2016

Hey, I got this new web project, but to be honest I haven’t coded much web in a few years and I’ve heard the 
landscape changed a bit. You are the most up-to date web dev around here right?

*-Nope.  I'm just an old web dev guy, but I do have a library I use for front end stuff*

Cool. I need to create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the 
REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table, and update it if anything changes in the server. I was 
thinking maybe using jQuery to fetch and display the data?

*-Ah, it's easier than that now.  You can just use HTML and a few intercooler.js attributes instead of JSON*

Oh, OK. What's intercooler.js?

*-A library built on top of jQuery that lets you hook AJAX requests into your DOM with HTML attributes.*

That sounds neat. Can I use intercooler.js to display data from the server?

*-Yep.  Just return bits of HTML from your end points.*

Wait, HTML?  Just like normal web requests?  

*-Yep.*

What’s wrong with HTML?

*-Nothing, man.  [HTML is great.](http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html)  Use it.*

Right. OK, so how do I install it?

*-Just include it along with jQuery, the usual way.*

Oh, jQuery!  I can still use that?

*-Of course, man.*

But I need to update this data if anything changes on the server.

*-Sounds like you might want to use the [ic-poll](http://intercoolerjs.org/attributes/ic-poll.html) attribute.*

Huh.  OK.  Anything else?

*-Nah, man.  Docs are [here](http://intercoolerjs.org/docs.html).  Pretty much everything you used to know about webdev still applies, just use bits of
HTML rather than whole documents.  Oh, also, there is an 
[official music to program in intercooler.js](http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/09/26/intercooler-official-soundtrack.html) 
with, if you are interested.*

Umm...  OK. Thanks?

*-Yep.  Cheers.*

Carson / [@carson_gross](https://twitter.com/carson_gross)