While working on the CareTechSys portal today, I reached the point where I realized I was piling too many client-side APIs on top of each other.
My site uses the following client-side libraries:
- Knockout.js
- Knockout.js Mapping Plugin
- jQuery
- jQuery UI
- jQuery Json plugin
- jQuery URL Parser plugin
- jQuery LoadMask plugin
I got to the point of adding client-side validation on some views, and quickly realized that this wasn't a trivial task, due mostly to the fact that I'm using the Knocking.js Mapping plugin.
That plugin is a really great tool for taking json objects you shuttle over via ajax and updating the UI with them (and then to send back to the server for updating later).
The downside to using it is that it's a bit harder to do some custom things, including using the nice Knockout.js Validation plugin, or the jQuery validation plugin.
So I went down the road a bit towards using the latter, and at some point realized, "Man, I'm API pluggin-ing myself to death here." The web gets pretty tangled.
Oh, and I'd also implemented some of the nice new HTML validation features, too. Of course, given that some major browsers still don't fully support those (you'll never guess the main culprit...), I knew I couldn't rely on those too much.
So I went back and decided to, since I already had access to a very nice client-side view modelvia Knockout.js mapping plugin and my custom server side json classes, why not just do validations on those and have some error labels ready to be displayed in the html.
The result is probably less sexy than if I'd piled up yet another JS library plugin on top of the site and written some more crazy code to glue them all together, but at least the pattern is somewhat clear, and that's one less potential source "API-interaction" issues.
It seems like awesome, shiny, fancy libraries are being invented and embraced on a daily basis, and it's really tempting to use everything cool as often as possible and possibly all at once. I think I've reached a point where I've got a soft limit on the number of different third party APIs I'm going to use on a single project.
"All things in moderation". Words to live by, and that includes third party JavaScript Libraries.
