My job centers around writing reusable javascript components. As a result, I spend a lot of time reading, a lot of time writing code, and a lot of time revisiting those things I’ve previously written, and trying to improve upon them. In recent months, I’ve been obsessed with performance improvements, both with rendering state as well as optimizing them for the browser’s paint cycles. There are, by now, plenty of articles out there about window.requestAnimationFrame(), deferred objects and promises, development patterns, up-and-coming Web Components proposals, etc. This article is going to be an attempt to marry a lot of those disparate concepts in the context of the jQuery UI Widget Factory, which is one of the more widely used frameworks out there for reusable UI components.
Continue reading →