Externals overview

[johnd0e]

Here I'm going to keep some thoughts about out current dependencies, left after #70/#134.

• https://jquery.com/ - used to be important sometime, but main problem it meant to solve (cross-browser compatibility) is not an issue nowadays.
  Over-using of jQuery is not good, as it facilitates undesirable code patterns.
  It's impossible to just get rid of jQuery as it's used in 3rd-party plugins, but we still can minimize it's usage.
• https://jqueryui.com/ - powerful framework, that is not actively maintained at the moment.
  Our codebase uses very limited set of functions available in jQueryUI, and even those have serious issues:
  • dialogs Dialogs code is a mess #224
  • sortables WIP: Bookmarks with SortableJS #346

jQueryUI has modular design, but currently we include it as a whole, even unused widgets.
It could be useful 'just in case', if only we had not forgotten to include corresponding css #224 (comment) (without it most widgets cannot be used).
Still, 3rd-party plugins can use unpredictable parts of framework.

Our current intention is switching to some modern framework like https://vuejs.org/ (#200 / #314)

[johnd0e]

• overlay-kml:

  • https://github.com/mapbox/togeojson now continues as https://github.com/tmcw/togeojson.
    We do not use it as there are no major changes yet (atm, there are ES2015+ and Add parsing of GPX extensions speed, course, hAcc, vAcc placemark/togeojson#18).
  • https://github.com/makinacorpus/Leaflet.FileLayer is not really useful, as we already have own (and better) facilities to load files: API for local files (up|down)loading #243.
    The only part that we are missing - easy buttons controls creation. But as it can be useful for a wide range of plugins - we better implement it in generic form (maybe adopt some Leaflet plugin, like 'easy button')

• draw-tools:

  • https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.draw is unmaintained, with a bunch of issues.
    We should consider switching to https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.Editable or https://github.com/geoman-io/leaflet-geoman (see also Draw enhancement ideas #144).
  • https://github.com/bgrins/spectrum is pretty heavy for colorpicker (I saw much lighter alternatives, e.g. https://evoluteur.github.io/colorpicker/index.html)

• core:

  • https://github.com/jeromeetienne/jquery-qrcode is used in single place.
    Perhaps it should be better to have it as plugin.
    The codebase is rather old. Alternatives: https://www.nayuki.io/page/qr-code-generator-library#javascript, https://www.cssscript.com/tag/qr-code/
  • https://github.com/richadams/jquery-taphold to be replaced with https://github.com/IITC-CE/jquery-taphold
  • https://github.com/bryanwoods/autolink-js used in single place: (and I don't feel it's necessary)

[johnd0e]

More alternatives:

• core
  • https://github.com/IITC-CE/Leaflet.Geodesic has an alternative: https://github.com/henrythasler/Leaflet.Geodesic
    More complex code without observable advantages. And it event does not try to address issue which is important in our case: balance between performance and accuracy Geodesic accuracy Leaflet.Geodesic#2.
• tidy-links:
  • https://github.com/ironwallaby/delaunay: has alternative implementation: https://github.com/mapbox/delaunator.
    Latter is more complex, and should be faster, but I failed to measure real difference for our case, so let's keep our previous https://github.com/IITC-CE/ingress-intel-total-conversion/issues/#70#issuecomment-464668503.

[johnd0e]

Unexplored alternatives:

• core:

  • https://github.com/jawj/OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier-Leaflet: see https://github.com/robertleeplummerjr/Leaflet.spiderfy/, see https://github.com/jawj/OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier-Leaflet#30, https://github.com/jawj/OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier-Leaflet#31

• regions:

  • https://github.com/jonatkins/s2-geometry-javascript/ has more advanced fork https://github.com/Daplie/s2-geometry.js/
    It's unclear if we really need that improvements (it also mentions some fixes).

[johnd0e]

https://github.com/Download/ulog/ is not latest version intentionally, see #366 (comment)