remove Rails dependency on jQuery

A small set of Rails features are dependent on the inclusion of jQuery. Basically, it’s everything UJS does. Including all of jQuery to support UJS feels like a heavy weight solution. In the past almost everyone was using jQuery so it seemed reasonable to include. The explosion of JS in the last few years is starting to make it’s inclusion more questionable. Many people have switched to using underscore or lodash, they’re using polyfills for fetch instead of $.ajax, or building heavy clients with one of the million available frameworks. In following with Mike Perham’s recent gem purge it seems like maybe it’s time jQuery went as well.

Hi Aaron,

That is one of the goals of this year’s GSoC: https://github.com/railsgsoc/ideas/wiki/2016-Ideas#implement-ujs-using-native-javascript

Excellent. Thanks for pointing this out.