In 2012, more than four and half years ago, i started to work on a small Javascript library called Stapes.js. At that time there was a big upswing in MVC libraries. People were building larger and more complex apps, and were looking for ways to better structure their code.

There were many libraries, but to me they seemed quite complex. Many libraries were more like frameworks: you needed to accommodate your code into their way of thinking, instead of the other way around.

I didn’t like that mentality. So i did what any good nerd would do: i wrote my own library.

I decided early on to follow the UNIX philosophy: do one thing, and do it well. Turns out that my library did three things: class creation, custom events, and data manipulation. But still, that was a lot less than virtually all the other libraries.

Another thing i decided on was that i would write good documentation. A depressing number of libraries, especially Javascript ones, have awful documentation. And even when there is documentation, there are no examples, which to me is the most important thing.

Development proceeded, and applications were built using Stapes. I’m especially proud of the projects at VPRO where i used Stapes, like 3voor12. Apparently, they are still using my little library.

Anyway, the last major release for Stapes was almost three years ago. After that, development has stopped. I occasionally responded to issues and pull requests. But it seems that most people are quite happy with the current state of Stapes.

In the meantime, the world of web development hasn’t stopped. People are building ever more complex apps. They use all kinds of new tools that didn’t even exist three years ago. And the development of the language hasn’t stopped as well: adaptation of ECMAScript 6 (the latest Javascript standard) is looking good, either with or without transpilers like Babel.

So, i need to take a hard look at the future of Stapes. Class creation will be useless because everyone will be using ES6 classes anyway. Custom events are nice, but there are lots of other libraries doing that as well. The data methods are useful, but the implementation in Stapes has never quite hit the sweet spot that i wanted.

And frankly, other people do better. One library that i’m especially fond of is called Vue.js. It shares the same ‘less is more’ philosophy of Stapes, but it’s far more versatile. It’s basically all the good bits of Angular.js 1.x without all the Java-enterprise-like nonsense and complexity.

Which leads me to this conclusion: Stapes simply doesn’t need more than it already has. It’s not dead. It will continue to work fine for your projects, and i might still fix some bugs in the future. But don’t expect any new features or radical changes.

An API that won’t change anymore. No new features. No surprises.

Sounds like the perfect time to finally release Stapes 1.0.0 :)

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3 comments

• xmory 2019-09-15 on 02:31

  Thanks for your nice work !

• Hiya 2020-05-23 on 10:40

  Thanks you!

• Salo 2020-12-07 on 09:22

  Vielen Dank für die tolle Arbeit