SPServices and Github – This Time I Mean It

SPServicesGitHub_LogoI’ve had some false starts moving SPServices to Git and/or Github over the last few years. If it weren’t for Josh McCarty’s (@joshmcrty) help on every release, I wouldn’t even have gotten SPServices onto cdnjs, since they use Github. (Yes, SPServices is available via CDN at cdnjs and has been for several years now.) I’m just tremendously behind the times.

So it’s only taken me about two years, but I’m really biting the bullet on Github this time. I’ve just read through a bunch of great suggestions I got when I abortively tried to move things to Github long ago and I’m curious given the amount of time that has passed those folks might do differently.

Here are my assumptions/preferences:

  • Simple, simple, simple
  • I’m using a public folder in my Dropbox as my “CDN” for development. I think Paul Tavares (@paul_tavares) knows where it is, but no one else does. This Dropbox-based CDN helps immensely for testing, since I can just point my script references there in all of my test environments. In case anyone is wondering, I’d love to use OneDrive (either flavor) for this, but it just doesn’t work the way it does redirects. I can get a clean URL from Dropbox that just plain works.
  • I’m leaning toward WebStorm for my IDE these days. (Where I can’t install it in client environments, I’ll still use SharePoint Designer and/or Sublime Text.) Webstorm has very robust integration with Github that even seems to make sense to me. I’ve got my Webstorm project embedded in the Dropbox CDN I mentioned above.
  • In case you’re wondering, I do probably 99% of the work on SPServices, so my ideas for version control have been extremely simple to date. SPServices is a one-file project and I make virtually all the changes to it. SPServices wouldn’t be what it is without excellent help and contributions from people like Josh McCarty and Paul Tavares; I couldn’t have gotten to this point without them. But as far as the actual edits and testing, it’s mostly me.
  • I’ll continue hosting the docs and downloads on Codeplex, at least for the foreseeable future. This makes sense because of the volume of documentation and the great discussions history that’s already there.

What I’m looking for is best (better) practices, build ideas, etc. SPServices will continue to live as long as people find it useful, and I want to keep building it and supporting it. That said, it’s my “side project” – something I do for fun and learning opportunities. So any ideas should be labor *saving*, not labor *producing*.

It’s my hope that – as they mentioned in the suggestions I linked to above – more people may decide to contribute with the move to Github. Who knows, maybe we can haul it into RESTland along with SharePoint 2013.

Today I posted the latest beta for the 2014.02 release. I expect to make it a stable release in about a week or so, since quite a few people have been downloading it and testing it as I’ve made changes over the last few months. I’ll write more about why you *really* should upgrade to this new version in an upcoming post. (Thanks yet again to Paul Tavares on this one.)

Thanks in advance for any ideas you can toss into the mix. Feel free to reply in the comments here or on the older thread in the Codeplex Discussions.

 

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14 Comments

  1. Welcome to the club! Curious… why are you using Dropbox for your CDN for development? Why not just point to a specific file in the repo for testing?

    FWIW, you could port the docs => GitHub wiki pages likely pretty easy from CodePlex… happy to help show the way and help! GH rocks and is so much nicer than CodePlex.

    1. Andrew:

      People are used to going to Codeplex for SPServices, so I’m not ready to move things fully at this point. I have a *lot* of doc pages, too, which are a mix of Codeplex’s old markup, markdown, and HTML-style.

      I haven’t had any files in Github before, so I didn’t have the option to just link to them. Can I reference files there in script tags directly? From the URLs it looks like I could, but OneDrive certainly doesn’t work.

      I’m using SharePoint Designer, Sublime Text, WebStorm, and a little Brackets at this point across all of my projects. (Generally one per project depending on when I started and what the client environment allows.) They each have their strengths.

      M.

      1. Personally I wouldn’t sweat it too much moving stuff… tons of very popular projects have done it in the past. A recent one would be TypeScript. But it really is up to you.

    2. AC:

      I just tried to reference the file in Github directly, and no go. It definitely comes across, but neither Firefox nor IE11 seems to treat it as a script file.

      e.g.,

      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://raw.githubusercontent.com/sympmarc/SPServices/master/src/jquery.SPServices.js"></script>
      

      M.

        1. My bad. It was a bug in my code. Referencing the file at the Github link above does indeed work. Nice!

          It’s still nice to store my local repo on Dropbox so that I can get to it from anywhere.

          M.

          1. Cool… but what does Dropbox give you? I would be very careful here as you could corrupt git with incomplete sync’s. If “get to it anywhere” is the goal, simple: clone the repo locally with git clients.

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