Comments on: Warning! JavaScript libraries are bad for you

By: Uriel Katz

Uriel Katz — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:59:15 +0000

as a wise man said before:”if you want to use a javascript library,you should first know how to write one”(or something like that ;) ).

By: HT

HT — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:24:40 +0000

I agree with everything Ara says!!! He’s really a cool cat!!! and very patient!!!
When i grow up… I wanna be just like him!!! :)

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 11:56:53 +0000

Chris: I should clarify that by saying “behemoth” I wasn’t meaning for that to imply YUI. I think that the approach taken by Yahoo is a good one, allowing developers to include what aspects are needed at any given time.

By: JGruuk, a monster named Gruuk but written in Java

JGruuk, a monster named Gruuk but written in Java — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:42:42 +0000

I cannot agree with. I just can’t! But again, as Luke said, it’s from a developer point of view. Can you imagine, my very dear friend, re-coding stuff like Struts/Spring/Hibernate just for the sake of code sanity? (sounds like Pat at the office, right?).

I agree with you that you must understand what you are doing when you do it (at least, tell this to my doctor). But your solution doesn’t fill the gap. People have to take the long road: read, learn, try, fail, understand, retry, succeed.

Anyways, hope my english is not that bad!

See ya.

By: Mathieu Gagnon

Mathieu Gagnon — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:52:55 +0000

I think Luke is right, after all isnt laziness one of the chief virtue of a programmer?

Libraries cannot be good or bad just by itself. They are just tools and we should decide when they help. You know what, I even think js would benefit an “import” statement so that all those libraries could reuse pieces between each other and stop reinventing themselves!

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 21:22:42 +0000

The hacker/tinkerer in my agrees with you whole heartedly. However my OO developer instincts tell me the direct opposite. Reinventing stuff that has been done millions of times already might be a good learning experience. But then again, you could spend more time on actually doing something meaningful with your libraries instead of recreating them.

Not everything is trivial so the question is – do you want to spend months trying to replicate functionality from an existing library, debugging, optimizing and tweaking the code on your own, or would you just include the library and move on with your project?

Thanks for the link though. I will definitely check out these books. I’m all for learning more abotu Javascript the right way. :)

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 06:51:19 +0000

I agree only halfway, too. When you learn from scratch, libraries are dangerous, however in order to make code work for a large team and get a whole team to develop JS, sticking to a library that normalizes browser bugs really saves the day.

I disagree with jQuery being a good choice though as its syntax is very much too alien in comparison with any native JS, you learn to use shortcuts that simply are not a given when you are to work oon a project that does not use it. There is no job description “need jQuery developer” yet, but there are JS jobs.

If you really are concerned about size (the hosted version of YUI is dead small, too, btw) then Dean Edward’s base2 is the better choice IMHO.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 05:46:45 +0000

I agree halfway with what you’re saying. While I do think that the majority of people using JS libraries are doing so with little benefit vs. the amount of extra code, I think that libraries can be helpful if, and only if, the person using them knows what’s going on “under the hood.”

This is why I tend to favor jQuery vs. some behemoth that tries to do everything under the sun. I’d say that jQuery and the YUI event utility are quite similar in what they do – help standardize cross-browser DOM traversing and adding of events, while not taking you out of the “driver’s seat” so to speak.

It’s like the old saying – “Software should be smart, not clever.” The point at which JS libraries start doing the majority of the thinking for you is the point at which one should take a step back and say “Whoa, do I really know what’s going on here?” If not, then it’s time to do a little due diligence and learn more for oneself, and not use the library as a crutch.