Swap out jQuery for Cash.js

[bennothommo]

This may need to wait until the Backend UI update, but thought I would put this down as an idea for future consideration.

There has been a fair bit of talk about how some people are put off by our reliance on jQuery, for two reasons:

• jQuery is old-school and is not necessary for modern web development when native syntax is now available, and,
• jQuery is bloated.

While I don't feel that we should ditch jQuery over the first point - it provides a great interface for DOM manipulation, AJAX handling and event handling, and there's heaps of plugins out there that are likely already using it - I do agree that it's bloated for our 95% of our uses.

I have come across cash.js which provides a jQuery-compatible API but takes advantage of native syntax to bring the filesize right down (36.5kb vs 262kb uncompressed). Its focus is mainly on DOM manipulation and event handling, but it is extendable just like jQuery.

I've given it a quick run and although we'd need to extend a fair bit of functionality for our use (AJAX in particular), it does seem to work, and this could be the first step towards optimising and modernising our footprint. With AJAX, it may be worth investigating if we replace jQuery's bloated AJAX functionality with fetch() (with polyfills for IE11 support on the CMS side).

[LukeTowers]

I feel like most of the complaints that typically rise from the use of jQuery are usually more subjective complaints about jQuery not being fashionable; so I'm not sure cash.js would do all that much to deal with people's complaints. It might be more effective to just better document the underlying structure of the AJAX framework itself and provide a couple different implementations of framework.js in the popular libraries.

[bennothommo]

Indeed, but I think the filesize contribution of jQuery is quite over the top, especially on the CMS side.

I have the AJAX framework modification pending in a fork, which I hope to put forward soon as I iron out the last few kinks. Basically provides a skeleton AJAX framework that uses the same API as before, but allows the bulk of the functionality to be provided using different frameworks, such as jQuery or Vue or even native JS.

[LukeTowers]

Looking forwards to seeing it! Probably v1.1.4 at the earliest is when we could evaluate doing that, but I'm excited to see what you've come up with!

[OVillani]

The file size is amazing, I'll definitely give it a try in another project. But the last update for cash.js was on Sept. 2020. Is it still maintained? jQuery got the last update to 3.6.0 on March, 3 this year.

[bennothommo]

As far as I can tell, it's still maintained. One of the benefits of wrapping vanilla JS in this fashion is that the browsers can push updates to the underlying JS and the library itself won't need to be updated, so it's likely this library doesn't actually need frequent releases.