The GOV.UK crew just lately revealed “How and why we eliminated jQuery from GOV.UK“. This was an insightful have a look at how a company can assess its tooling and whether or not one thing remains to be the most effective device for the job. This isn’t a nudge to strip libraries out of your present undertaking proper now! Many people should be supporting legacy tasks and browser necessities that forestall this from being a viable possibility.
Among the criticism seems to be that the library dimension argument is negligible on trendy community speeds and caching.
GOV.UK posted an replace to deal with this criticism with metrics – “The impression of eradicating jQuery on our internet efficiency“.
This text additionally makes the case for enhancing 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 As an alternative of upgrading disparate outdated variations of code and having to deal with safety updates in a piecemeal method, eradicating the dependency reduces this footprint.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. Enhancing upkeep and developer expertise performed a task into their determination.
What caught my eye particularly was the hyperlink to the documentation on tips on how to take away jQuery. Understanding tips on how to decouple and carry out migration steps are upkeep duties that may proceed to come back 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Additional musing on this topic turned up the outdated chestnuts “You May Not Want jQuery” (2014), “(Now Extra Than Ever) You May Not Want jQuery” (2017), “Is jQuery nonetheless related?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).
