jslibs Overview

Web projects frequently use external Javascript libraries such as jQuery. Getting these libraries into your project and publishing them as static resources isn’t terribly hard. But doing a quality job is a fair amout of work.

jslibs is a small package with few dependencies, aimed at providing a high quality, curated set of Javascript packages for Pyramid projects. In essence, a group of people have taken the work they are already doing, then pushing it out to share with others. This work includes use of Juicer to increase responsiveness of apps.

Is

• Curated, maintained, documented, tested
• Multiple versions of the external libraries “we” use
• Friendly to far-future expires strategies via version numbers in files
• Easy to use for Pyramid projects
• Various combinations of combined/minified using Juicer

Is Not

• The one, official way to do things. If you don’t like it, ignore it or do your own, it’s not that big of a deal.
• Every single Javascript package, only the ones “we” use
• Framework-y and complicated

Might Be

• Framework-y, if we want to cover Deform’s need for a resource registry

How It Works

The jslibs team maintain a project in the Pylons GitHub with the documentation and machinery to spew out packaged-up distributions of stuff. The package, when checked out by us, will pull in various Javascript projects as “externals”. Thus, we won’t have jQuery checked in directly into Pylons/jslibs.

We’ll then run some scripts which use Juicer to produce different flavors of stuff: teeny tiny, normal, and jumbo. After that, we’ll push an egg to PyPI, and people can then make the egg a dependency of their project. The egg will likely contain all versions of previously-packaged stuff.

More info available in usage.