Greg Reimer's Weblog: Web Technologist for Sun.COM Web Design

Read the reglib tag trail for more about reglib, or subscribe to the feed of all things tagged reglib.

Let me first of all stress that I'm not trying to bust on JQuery here. JQuery does something that needs to be done, and it does it just about as well as can be done given the tool-set browsers have collectively placed at our disposal.

With that said, I'm going to go ahead and pimp the reglib way of doing things, by which I mean declarative, over the load-traverse-modify methodology, which JQuery makes so easy.

The demo page linked below has two identical interactive widgets; one wired up using JQuery, and the other wired up using reglib.

» Demo Page «

The page is rigged like a science experiment, with a control followed by several tests in which you observe differences in behavior between the two widgets in response to various stimuli. The goal is to demonstrate reglib's resilience under duress (as it were). Enjoy.

The reglib is now published to Google Code and available under the MIT license.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/reglib/
Download: http://code.google.com/p/reglib/downloads/list

The backstory - Almost a year ago¹ I made all kinds of big talk about releasing a JavaScript lib I was developing for sun.com. This library obviates (some of) the need for what I call the load-traverse-modify methodology of unobtrusive JavaScript:

• Load: make it your business to know when the DOM has loaded.
• Traverse: use a query to scan said DOM, returning a list of elements.
• Modify: attach event handlers to, and otherwise manipulate, those elements.

Although LTM is quite common in JavaScript development, I believe it's an antipattern. The reglib tries to get closer to the CSS way of doing things: declare what kinds of elements get what behavior, and have that declaration take immediate effect at a global level, regardless of subsequent mutations to the DOM.

// JAVASCRIPT CODE:
reg.click("a.popup", function(e){
    window.open(this.href);
    return false;
});

/*
ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
I declare, forthwith, that all clicks on <a> elements with
class "popup" shall be handled thusly...
*/

So there you have it. Feel free to check it out (just check it out or actually check it out), read the documentation wiki, download, leave comments, etc. The lib also has a bunch of convenience functions for DOM manipulation, plus it has tools for doing LTM stuff because let's face it, sometimes there's no other way.

(Previous posts on this topic can be found here and here.)

¹ It took so long because, in a nutshell: 1) Sun has an open source review process, you can't just release code willy-nilly, 2) During the process, I failed to be a squeaky wheel, and in fact the lawyers waited on my responses as much as I waited on their responses. However development over that interval has been constantly active, and reglib is being used on sun.com.