Alex Vincent: Replacing JSLib in Verbosio

I came to an unpleasant decision last week. While working on reorganizing Verbosio's source code, I realized that JSLib should not survive the transition. I didn't really like this very much. JSLib has been useful to me in the past. But when I thought about it, the only thing I used JSLib for was its file I/O utilities. These utilities should be used from chrome (and I abused that in my file search components). Plus, I'm a much more experienced developer than when I first started with Abacus over four years ago. The Mozilla code base has similarly improved, and I just felt I could do the same job I was asking JSLib to do, with less (and cleaner) code. I'm not saying JSLib is a bad library or a bad idea - far from it. I'm saying what I needed from JSLib is too small to justify having it around. Libraries for Mozilla are a popular idea - FUEL, STEEL, and JavaScript modules (.jsm) come to mind. Besides, if you're going to replace a library with one of your own, you should add value (not just cut costs). I decided to write a library that, in theory, would be able to read and write to flat files, zip archives... view original article
Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:41:26 +0200

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