I think the repository is a big step forward. I've been holding back on commenting on this until an idea I've been working on congeals, but it's still right there at the edge and refuses to come fully into focus.
My biggest problem with all of the plugins is dependencies. I end up writing large plugins and including everything with them just to ensure they will work, rather than rely on the existence of a particular plugin on a machine. I don't like having to do this. I also don't like having to add 100 script tags to every document I write for performance reasons. As a first step to deal with this, I was planning on writing a script caching mechanism as a web service. It would store scripts in database fields in both packed and unpacked forms. The idea would be to call <script src="generateScripts.cfm?scripts=jQuery,.foms,.cookies,.metadata,.tablefilter, etc."> .something would mean to prefix it with the most recent non-prefixed entry - in this case jquery. The app would pull the packed scripts, append them into one and hand it to the browser, caching the signature and output for faster retrieval next time. Plugin authors should be able to keep the dependencies up to date pretty easily, and if all plugins followed some basic rules, like don't change the API for minor version releases, the system could automatically update any dependency with newer code automatically, possibly running some kind of unit test on both unpacked and packed versions and alerting the author if there are problems. Here's an idea: If the newly created official plugin repository could be the home for the plugins themselves, and had a "publishing" interface that could make its data available to other servers via a web service or json/xml download, perhaps the community could create a local application in several different versions - php, cfml, asp/x, perl, etc. that would pull all of the metadata and dependency info from the central server on a regular basis, then did all the assembly and serving of scripts locally. FWIW... John Resig wrote: > > > Feedback is appreciated, as always. > > --John > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/New-Plugin-Repository-tf3944529s15494.html#a11296684 Sent from the JQuery mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
