[Seaside-dev] About including external resources in Seaside packages

[Lukas Renggli]

With the release of JQueryUI 1.7.2 I wonder if it still makes sense to
include all this Javascript libraries and CSS stiles directly into the
Seaside code base?

There are several disadvantages of doing so:

1. It is a pain to import the libraries and the 20 JQueryUI CSS themes.
2. The Javascript and CSS files are relatively large. As a consequence
    - the Monticello package gets large and slow
    - the change-set size of your image increases drastically with every change
3. Some Smalltalk do not support String literals of the required size.
4. For deployment the libraries are not used, thus the whole process
is sort of a waste of effort.

As a lightweight solution I propose to embed all files by referring to
the Google AJAX Library server [1]. This is lightweight, performant
and extremely easy to do. The latest Javascript code is usually
available within hours after a release.

The only disadvantages I see is that while development you need to be
connected to the internet and that Google might track your use of the
library (but they do that anyway). For deployment it would be
reasonable to keep the setup, or replace the references with links
that point to your own server.

What do you think?

Lukas

[1] http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/index.html#AjaxLibraries

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch