On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:16 AM, Niklas Laxström
<niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I was reading
http://stateofjs.com/2016/introduction/#sections and
could not avoid noticing that the frameworks or technologies we use
are not among the most popular or most liked among the participants of
this survey.
Examples:
* Frontend frameworks: We use jQuery and OOjs UI. The latter does not
appear at all in the list, jQuery is not in the top ten. This question
might be biased though on what people perceive as a framework.
I definitely wouldn't call jQuery a framework. (My rule of thumb is:
if you call its functions, it's a library. If it calls your functions,
it's a framework.) But it's interesting how low it appears. I guess
jQuery provides less functionality over bare JavaScript in modern
browsers.
Given that OOjs UI was developed by us, for our needs, and that we've
put basically no effort into promoting it (folks have gotten it on
https://cdnjs.com/ recently, though), I'm not surprised no one outside
of us heard of it.
* Testing framework: We mostly use qUnit, Cucumber,
Selenium. Of these
only Cucumber appears in the top 6 and it has very low satisfaction
(people who have used do not like it).
QUnit wasn't even in their survey, yet it took second place among the
"write-in" votes.
Parsoid uses Mocha (the most popular in the survey) for testing. We
experimented with Jasmine (second most popular) in MediaWiki around
2012, but it was abandoned in favor of QUnit.
* CSS tools: We use plain CSS and Less. Less has
considerable lower
satisfaction than SASS/SCSS and is less popular.
CSS has high usage and satisfaction scores though. I always said
allowing Less was a mistake ;)
Less is more accessible than SASS to developers who know CSS,
syntax-wise. SCSS is almost the same though, I honestly don't see why
you'd prefer one to the other.
We experimented with SCSS too, for MediaWiki UI styling. It was
abandoned in favor of Less in 2013, mostly because we have Less
support and SCSS required a build step before committing.
* Build tools: We don't use these in core to my
knowledge, but many
extensions seem to use Grunt for running linting tools. Again, Grunt
has very low satisfaction compared to other tools.
Just about everything that includes any JavaScript code uses Grunt for
linting, including MediaWiki core.
--
Matma Rex