Never use 3rd party javascript

In the 15-odd years I've been doing client-side web development, I've seen precisely one piece of script on the internet that worked as advertised and was durable enough to consider including in one my projects. That exception to the rule is jQuery itself.

jQuery plugins, however, exemplify that golden rule. Every time I've tried to use one (being a hopeless optimist and breaking my own rule), I've been bitten hard and ended up either rewriting it from scratch or spending more time trying to get it to work in a reliable manner than it would have taken to rewrite it from scratch.

I have no idea why this has to be the case, but it is. Javascript you find on the internet is worse than worthless. As such, while it's a shame they lost their plugin site, we're all probably a little better off for having to write our own stuff for a while.

It's the same with CPAN, PEAR and anything else where you allow users to contribute additional separate components which aren't maintained by the core developers.

I'm not a very a very experienced javascript developer, just the occasional user, but the malfunctioning third party script syndrom is still out there on the javascript world. Sure the situation might be better than in 1997 but still...

I wouldn't say CPAN is comparable, the standard is higher and the modules work without glitches in most of the cases.

So there are (hopefully :-) exceptions to the rule!

One question -- why Hungarian notation for all the API bits?

Don't bother breaking compatibility with old versions.

You want to know something that is 100x better? This exact comment on your FAQ page. More people will read it, understand you made that decision, and move on.

If someone cares enough they will fork it and change the variable names. But in reality it doesn't matter.

the API might use hungarian notation, and you might have fallen out of love with it, but so what? it's a pretty decent API and there's no real benefit to users in changing it. they'll all to have to update/rewrite their JS to stay up to date with the library for effectively no reason.

I know I don't want to update my own code for a new API on every release! Going back to the point of the OP there are certainly cases when writing custom code is beneficial for that reason, and equally (I believe) there are times when a tried and tested library such as DataTables is suitable.

Most of the jQuery plugins I've implemented involve me doing a proof of concept with the original plugin, then stripping it down or modifying it to meet any unmet performance or

Mixing plugins can be frustrating - it would be nice if some of them got together to do a plugin distro... it's the next logical extension.

Most jQuery plugins were spagetti dom manipulations with a config object passed/merged in to defaults.

I never trusted that plugin site, and would always make sure the plugin was on github and being actively maintained etc.

I really like the idea of https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ the stats on last update issue fixed, and popularity metrics helps allot. JS should have the same.

An example for me was that we needed something that would float buttons in certain positions depending on user input, so the obvious solution was to get a plugin that did tooltips and change the graphics to hide everything but a button. Worked like a charm and not a single error on any browser or mobile device. The problem was it was nearly 75k all in. This is no criticism of the author, he did an amazing job of being as broadly adopted as possible by giving every option everyone had asked for and more. Obviously though I only need 1 set of those options out of the hundreds he'd had squeezed into his code.

Before we went live I decided to find time over a weekend to rewrite and got it just as stable and robust for under 6k. Clearly as a one off this is could be considered a minor issue but with times that by 5 plugins and you start having an unpleasant experience for people.

I've released a number of WordPress themes and I always get requests like "put in an option so the menu can be on the left or the right", "make it so I can pick any font from Google fonts using just a dropdown in the theme options" and many other wacky requests. I find myself having to draw a line between useful requests that everyone will benefit from and crazy edge cases that just serve one or two people but will destroy the elegance of my original vision. It's hard saying no to people, but it has to be done.

This is a curious blanket statement. While I have run up against the odd crappy jQuery plugin, the tried-and-true plugins work flawlessly - often throughout jQuery's versions.

I think you're doing a disservice to those who take the time to make great jQuery plugins. The web - as a whole - is better because of the power that these plugins offer designers and developers alike. More people can abandon Flash for simplistic bells & whistles because of the jQuery Plugin.

Ideally they would be something you could pull off github, read the docs and understand the main architectural concepts involved (say, autocomplete) and then easily extend. This would be of far more value to me than a plug-in that try's to do everything under the sun for a mythical end user.

Yes, there are terrible Jquery plugins out there. But, I have a nice collection of ones I've used in previous projects that have saved me many hours.

I can now concentrate on the functionality of my application rather than writing yet another table pagination plugin.

It's also nice because if you can find a mature enough plugin, most of the bugs have been fixed for you through the community of people that use it.

That's the takeaway here, no matter how much of a hassle it is backup the DB before you practice delete-fu - no matter how ninja you are you will make a mistake.

But as we all hated that bloody website anyway I doubt anyone will shed a tear.

Maybe it was a relational-algebra-based freudian slip...

If my server crashes, the hot replicated backup server will take over. If a hacker destroys both servers and all local backups then I have my last full offsite backup and my nightly off-site transaction log backups so, at most, I'd lose one day.

And I'm not much of a sysadmin -- I've a sole developer and I usually sysadmin by Googling everything and using some common sense and yet I still managed to throw this setup together. You would think a site as big and important as jQuery would put have some common-sense backup procedures in place.

Another thing that comes to mind here are Jekyll, Hyde, and Toto, content management / blog engines that make it easy to host everything on Github and use it as a storage. Toto even uses Github as the main and only storage.

I don't see why that would be so good. Even if github is the best thing thing in the world after chocolate cookies.

Personally I don't like jquery plugins website, I find it clunky. Secondly, I agree that github has a nice slick interface. I still don't think the massive migration to github is a good thing. I would much prefer more diversity. Github doesn't even have a discussion/mailing list platform, I don't think that's a very positive thing for many projects, just to give an example.

But mostly I'm curios, 'specially because of their interface', what are the other reasons?

Damage controlling like a ninja.

There are several comments on the linked page from people, developers even, that say they hung out there daily.

badger7 39 minutes ago | link [dead]

Many of us have made that mistake - we're the ones with 'WHERE' tattood on the back of our right hands.

From the original response: "In cleaning up spam on the old site we got a bit overeager and decided it wouldn't make sense to leave the broken remains."

Don't get me wrong, I love jquery. Just the website is an abomination...

Curiously a large portion of their target audience consists of web-designers. Has really nobody offered to replace that mess with something good?

on another company, those sysadmin could not recover from a mis-operation either, the whole company lost 4 month of development time. those people, amazingly, still keep their jobs.

Adam should leave this project the second day, this kind of error is simply unforgivable.

Where were your redundant source control servers, local and offsite backups, iterative staging environments, etc? Hell, I have all of those at my current workplace and I still keep unofficial backups of everything critical on my workstation. These are all long-established best practices and relatively simple and cheap. The only way I'd fire someone over 'rm -rf /' was if it was done with malicious intent or was one of many examples of someone's ineptitude of negligence.

On an open-source project with low/no budget and less checks and balances, I think you have to be even more forgiving.

He just made an honest mistake.

The only sad/odd thing is that they had no daily backups.

I think this should be reminder it's not a bad idea to use more comprehensive solutions like dojo toolkit or YUI.

I imagine it's because we find your attempts to correlate maintence of the plugin repository by jQuery's shepards and the quality of plugins developed by independent people illogical.

> plugin repository was deleted and everyone acts like no damage was done.

Your comments weren't about being wary of using random third party plugins that are likely to go unmaintained. I assume that everyone looks out and is cautious of that, as I do. I presume for example that when searching for django social-auth apps, a high priority in making a choice is the activity and last commit timestamp.

Your two comments above just seem to link the plugin repo to hating on jquery in general, which I don't really understand.

(for example, the top comment in this thread is basically "be wary of third party javascript", but it's actually phrased that way and it's been much better received)

PS. Read my first comment two or three times IN FULL. Then maybe you will get the message i tried to carry over. Reading text with understanding is a very valued skill.

And you're really going to tell me I'm being "young and naive" because I expect that others probably watch out for whether they're using a maintained project or abandonware?

You need to lose the attitude. I didn't even downvote your comments but I wish I could downvote this last one. Probably the rudest reply I've ever received here. It's not as if you're new here. I keep coming back to this and reading it in shock. I can't believe you're being this delusional, accusatory and flat out rude towards me. Someone pissed in your Post Toasties this morning.

I don't even have a point I'm trying to prove here. I couldn't care less if you like/use or dislike/avoid jQuery.

> This is the reason i'm not touching jquery

I'm using something else because of external plugin situation for jquery in general.

> everything beyond jquery and jqueryUI

Where do i attack jquery project? "You point blank used this scenario to dog " WHERE ?

> should be untrusted to a degree.

It means you should be extra careful what third party code (beyond jquery maintained projects) you choose.

> "went so far as to say you'd use a more robust one."

Oh so now it's in bad tone to provide alternatives to your favourite framework? Seriously we are not supposed to speak of other software here?

> "You're really going to act like I'm mischaracterizing what you said"

Yes, seriously in my eyes you do exactly that - that's why you got harsh replies. I might have to live with jackass tag, but It is my right to not agree to change my words to something else.

Can we move to something else, it's not like we are contributing to topic anymore.

>Can we move to something else, it's not like we are contributing to topic anymore.

Thanks White Knight. You're the champion of usefulness in this thread.