Re: [xwiki-devs] KnockoutJs is a great library

On 31 Jan 2018, at 11:02, Guillaume Delhumeau <guillaume.delhumeau(a)xwiki.com> wrote: Hi developers, We have never really decided what we will do with javascript frameworks in the future. Angular was a good candidate at some point, and we have even used it in the File Manager application. But then we have been very disappointed when we discovered the new versions of Angular were not retro-compatible. It may have been fixed since then, but I have not really followed the news about it. An other disadvantage of AngularJS is that it does too much.

For example, they have a custom component system with a kind of dependencies injections. But we already can do that with RequireJS, for which it is the job. I have already started to split my JavaScript's code in several components thanks to RequireJS, and it works well. I think it's good to continue with RequireJS. It is currently our go-to library when we need to use jQuery, or even... Angular. I have worked a lot on a new version of the Nested Pages Migrator last year. The new version has never been released, because of blocking bugs on the XWiki Platform's core-side. But I now have some experience with the library I used: KnockoutJS. It's a very simple library that does only one job and does it well: two-way data-bindings. It plays well with RequireJS and it does not re-invent its own component mechanism. The HTML code is not polluted by non-valid tags (instead it uses "data-" properties and special HTML comments). The documentation is extremely clear, and tutorials are great. It's not the most popular library out there, but it's stable and still alive. The trends are changing so quickly in the JS world (React was the star not so long ago, but now it is hated because of a license change...), but Knockout is still there. If the project dies, I think it will be easier to replace it with an other simple library than a big "framework". This is not a proposal or a vote, but only a feedback about this library.