# Alpine JS

I recently did a small project with CSS and JS, so I thought I'd try out [Alpine JS](https://alpinejs.dev/). I'd come across it ages ago, been intrigued, but not got round to trying it out. Since it's good for small projects it seemed like a good time to try it.

For some things I found it so much simpler than JS. If I wanted to change a class on something based on a mouse click, that was easy. Similarly showing and hiding things.

Getting slightly more complicated was harder though. I was trying to do a timer. Doing that in JS is easy, but I also had to update what was shown on screen and the data stored in Alpine. Which was itself connected to the screen display. I tried a few different things before my Googling led me to enough examples that I worked out how to do the whole thing in Alpine JS.

In Summary, if you don't need a lot of JS and you're only using it to change the display, then Alpine is going to be a lot quicker and easier - it's written in the HTML, so you don't need a separate script file. Beyond that, I think JS is going to be quicker. But I really enjoyed playing with Alpine JS and figuring out how it worked. Getting it to work definitely felt like an achievement!