The GOV.UK group just lately revealed “How and why we eliminated jQuery from GOV.UK“. This was an insightful take a look at how a company can assess its tooling and whether or not one thing remains to be the very best software for the job. This isn’t a nudge to strip libraries out of your present venture proper now! Many people should be supporting legacy tasks and browser necessities that stop this from being a viable choice.
A few of the criticism seems to be that the library dimension argument is negligible on fashionable community speeds and caching.
GOV.UK posted an replace to deal with this criticism with metrics – “The influence of eradicating jQuery on our net efficiency“.
This text additionally makes the case for bettering upkeep. As an alternative of upgrading disparate outdated variations of code and having to deal with safety updates in a piecemeal method, eradicating the dependency reduces this footprint. That is the dream of getting the luxurious for addressing technical debt.
Beforehand, GitHub additionally documented how they incrementally decoupled jQuery from their front-end code. Bettering upkeep and developer expertise performed a job into their choice.
What caught my eye specifically was the hyperlink to the documentation on how you can take away jQuery. Understanding how you can decouple and carry out migration steps are upkeep duties that can proceed to return up for web sites and it’s reassuring to have a information from somebody that needed to do the identical.
Additional musing on this topic turned up the outdated chestnuts “You May Not Want jQuery” (2014), “(Now Extra Than Ever) You May Not Want jQuery” (2017), “Is jQuery nonetheless related? (1)” (2016), and “Is jQuery nonetheless related? (2)” (2017).
