charlieknoll / tko

Technical Knockout – Monorepo for KO 4.0

TKO (“Technical Knockout”)

TKO houses the monorepo of Knockout.

Getting Started

To install use one of the usual package managers e.g.

• $ yarn install tko
• $ npm install tko

Using the Monorepo

The following commands are to get the build system set up.

Command	Effect
$ git clone [email protected]:knockout/tko	Clone the repository.
$ npm install -g yarn otherwise	Ensure yarn is globally available
$ yarn	Install local node packages
$ yarn run lerna	Link local packages/ to each other
$ yarn test	Run all tests
$ yarn run build	Make the dist/ko[.es6].js files, where the .es6 version has not been passed through Babel

Checkout package.json for more script commands that can be executed with yarn run {command}.

In each individual packages/*/ directory, you can also run (presuming rollup and karma are installed globally):

Command	Effect
$ karma COMMAND ../../karma.conf.js [--once]	Test the local package, where COMMAND is e.g. start or run
$ rollup -c ../../rollup.config.js	Build the package into the local dist/

visual.html

Note that running karma or rollup will create a visual.html file that shows the proportional size of imports into each package.

Objectives

TKO aims to become a base for future versions of Knockout. The objectives include:

• Modularization into ES6 and separate projects, with compilation using an ES6 compiler like Rollup. This solves several problems with Knockout, including:
  • Some folks want to roll-their-own with e.g. removing components
  • Compilation is now with Closure compiler, which is actually transliterating – meaning the debug and minified versions have different code paths (mostly in the form of things exposed in debug being missing in the minified version)
  • The compilation of Knockout is just concatenation, leading to difficulties with maintainance, severance, and replacement
• Documentation inline in the source code. This aims to make it easier to document, by making documentation adjacent to the code about-which it speaks. Also, we aim to have examples in the documentation.
• A more comprehensive home page. The hope is to have something fun and fancy, and we have a rough prototype.
• Better setup for plugins. The problems with Knockout include:
  • There's no central, searchable repository for knockout
  • What should be simple plugins (e.g. binding handlers or providers) are complex, including:
    • Built-ins have first-class access to quite a bit of good Knockout code, but plugins generally have second-class access and often have to duplicate Knockout internals
    • Quality plugins have lots of boilerplate for compilation, release, documentation, and testing

Next steps

There's an issue for that.

License

MIT license - http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php.