Ask HN: High Quality JavaScript Code Bases?

4 points·atomicnature··5 comments

Are there any JS projects which you consider to be top notch and worthy of emulation.

Library code is OK, but extra +1 if you can point me towards any extremely well done application level JS.

Thanks.

Although it's not my stack of choice, it's generally a good starting point:

https://github.com/ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate

JQuery.

I'm serious. Every time I see modern JS I look back at the JQuery ecosystem and it seems like we were all expelled from paradise. Elegant, modular, flexible, simple. Easy to use and extend. Even had a GUI library. No need for cross-compilation. No need for a package manager with a centralized namespace and a brittle and easily sabotaged dependency tree, because the web itself is the package manager (as God intended.)

jQuery codebase is pretty ugly, it has written mostly ES5, it is using custom mixin system and is full of weird workarounds for IE.

jQuery age was horrible. You needed to manually add <script/style/fonts> into HTML. Everything was based on classes and IDs, small change in CSS would brake jQuery functionality. Codebases were poorly organised and often a mixture of PHP and JS that was re-initialised on every form click. If you wanted to use a third party component, you typically needed to pay for it. Before package managers, you got a zip file, or you needed to include script tag to third party domain in specific order, after jQuery and jQuery-UI.

Apache Guacamole

Extremely elegant ES5 project

https://github.com/apache/guacamole-client (mirror)

I remember jquery being an early classic with some annotated versions being available when I had an interest in learning js. No idea how much it has dated now.

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