CHAPTER 2 Writing Maintainable, Future-Friendly Code
Managing Third-Party Components
Unless you’re working on a personal project, chances are your Web ap-
plication will rely on one or more third-party components to function
properly. Even the best, most experienced developers turn to third-party
components when there are aspects of the Web application that they don’t
want to own or maintain. It doesn’t make sense for everyone to create their
own way of doing everything and so third-party components help get Web
applications up and running faster while outsourcing maintenance to
someone else.
For example, when a new browser comes out you can be sure that
jQuery will be updated to support it. All you need to do is drop in the
latest version and your Web application continues to work fine. If you
had created your own browser abstraction library, it would be up to you
to keep it up to date whenever a new browser is released. Since that
happens every six weeks for Chrome and Firefox, updating your code
would be an onerous and repetitive task that keeps you from doing more
important things.
You aren’t adding value to your business or application by constantly
rewriting low-level utilities. Using third-party components frees you up to
focus on the true value you can provide to your users.how To ChooSe ThiRD-PaRTY CoMPonenTS
There are many different kinds of third-party components. There are
JavaScript libraries for almost everything, CSS frameworks and toolkits,
images and fonts, and other types of components that will continue to
evolve along with Web technologies. Choosing these third-party compo-
nents is a very important decision because they represent the materials
and tools with which your Web application will be built. Just like building
a house, you want to make sure that the materials are solid and the tools
a re t r u st wor t hy.