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Sprinkles

Awww yeah! Version 2 is coming soon, chock-full of goodies like CSS utilities, XHR promises, animation & localStorage helpers, and much more! For a complete list of upcoming improvements, please check out the v2 milestone. Enjoy!

Sprinkles is ActiveSupport for your browser.

The goal of this project is to isolate a small collection of helpers and extensions to make our lives as front-end engineers a little easier — just like ActiveSupport has done for Ruby on Rails engineers.

Though syntatically optimal, monkey patching is general considered a bad idea so Sprinkles prefixes all methods and globals with a "$" to differentiate them from any native methods your client may have.

In Sprinkles, you'll find:

What you won't find in this project is:

  • Effects or animation (e.g., fadeOut())
  • Browser backwards-compatibility
  • Heavy-handed DOM manipulation (e.g., wrapAll())
  • DOM selection (e.g., Sizzle)
  • Anything a modern browser can already do

This project is under active development so things will change dramatically as it matures. For contributions, please fork and submit pull requests.

Array Extensions

Your browser is all grown up! Let it forEach(), map(), and reduce() your arrays.

var pies = ["apple", "pecan", "cherry"];

pies.forEach(function(pie, i) {
  alert("Do you like " + pie + " pie ?");
}); // Alerts "Do you like..." three times

pies.map(function(pie, i) {
  return pie + " pie";
}); // Returns ["apple pie", "pecan pie", "cherry pie"]

pies.reduce(function(previousPie, currentPie) {
  return previousPie + "," + currentPie;
}); // Returns "apple,pecan,cherry"

Sprinkles adds $flatten() to Array.prototype.

[[1], [2], [3]].$flatten(); // Returns [1, 2, 3]

Sprinkles also adds $groupBy().

["cat", "dog", "turtle"].$groupBy(function(animal) {
  return animal.length;
})

// Returns { 3: ["cat", "dog"], 6: ["turtle"] }

Sprinkles adds $includes().

["mac", "linux", "windows"].$includes('mac');

// Returns true

Cookies

Working with cookies isn't very fun if all you have is document.cookie. Sprinkles adds document.$cookies that makes managing cookies a little easier. The API is designed to closely match that of localStorage.

document.$cookies.setItem("foo", "bar"); // Write a cookie, "foo", with value "bar"
document.$cookies.getItem("foo");        // Returns "bar"
document.$cookies.removeItem("foo");     // Remove cookie, "foo"
document.$cookies.clear();               // Remove all cookies

Sprinkles always assumes the path on all your cookies is / and does not support cookies that specify domain, max-age, expires, or secure — maybe one day.

Date Extensions

Manipulating a dates in JavaScript sucks. Sprinkles makes it suck less.

var d = new Date(1986, 0, 24, 20, 25); // Jan 24th, 1986 at 20:25
d.$beginningOfDay();                   // Jan 24th, 1986 at 00:00
d.$endOfDay();                         // Jan 24th, 1986 at 23:59
d.$beginningOfMonth();                 // Jan  1st, 1986 at 00:00
d.$endOfMonth();                       // Jan 31st, 1986 at 23:59
d.$tomorrow();                         // Jan 25th, 1986 at 20:25
d.$yesterday();                        // Jan 23rd, 1986 at 20:25
d.$monthName();                        // "January"
d.$dayName();                          // "Friday"

DOM Manipulation

Sprinkles won't do things a modern browser can already do, even if that means a bit more typing.

var results = document.querySelector("#results"), // Retrieve an element
    result  = document.createElement("div");      // Create an element

result.classList.add("result");                   // Add a class to an element
result.textContent = "One more thing...";         // Set the content of an element

results.appendChild(result);                      // Add an element as a child

If you do a lot of this maybe you should write a function like createElement(name, content, parent) or use jQuery (gasp!).

Node Extensions

If you want to clear an element of all its children, you can do el.innerHTML = "" (gross) or loop through all the child nodes and remove them one at a time (tedious). Sprinkles adds $removeChildren() to Node.prototype to make it easy.

var ul = document.querySelector("ul");
ul.$removeChildren(); // Removes all the list items (clears the list)

Object Extensions

In Ruby, there's little distinction between looping over an array or a hash — you call the same method (i.e. each()). The difference is the signature of the callback function. For an array, the callback receives one primary argument (each item in the array); for a hash, the callback recieves two arguments (each key value pair in the hash). Sprinkles adds $forEach() to Object.prototype so that you can similarly loop through the keys and values of any object.

var object = { a: 1, b: 2, c: 3 },
    keys   = [],
    values = [];

object.$forEach(function(key, value) {
  keys.push(key);
  values.push(value);
})

// keys   = ["a", "b", "c"]
// values = [1, 2, 3]

ActiveSupport extends all objects with a try() method - Sprinkles does too. $try() allows you to attempt to call a method or access a property on an object that might otherwise be undefined.

var car = { make: "Porsche", model: "911", start: function(key) { } };
car.$try("make")         // Returns "Porsche"
car.$try("color")        // Returns null
car.$try("start", "...") // Calls start() and passes in "..." as the key

Query String Params

Read the query string params off any URL with the class methods Sprinkles adds to Location:

Location.$getParams("http://example.com/?a=1&b=2")     // Returns { "a": "1", "b": "2" }
Location.$getParam("http://example.com/?a=1&b=2", "a") // Returns "1"

Sprinkles also adds instance methods Location.prototype to read query string params from the current window's location:

// Assume window.location = "http://example.com/?a=1&b=2"
window.location.$getParams()   // Returns { "a": "1", "b": "2" }
window.location.$getParam("a") // Returns "1"

String Inflections

ActiveSupport has a bunch of slick string inflections. Sprinkles just has the one for now.

"1".$ordinalize()  // "1st"
"22".$ordinalize() // "22nd"

XHR (AJAX)

Creating an XMLHttpRequest object from scratch is tedious, so get() and getJSON() have been added to window as convenience.

window.$get("http://example.com/plain-text",
  function(text) { console.log(text) },     // success
  function(text) { console.log(text) }      // error
);

window.$getJSON("http://example.com/json",
  function(object) { console.log(object) }, // success
  function(object) { console.log(object) }  // error
})

Since all variables and methods delegate to window you can simply call $get().

Development

Sprinkles uses Grunt to run development-oriented tasks. Grunt relies on Node Packaged Modules (NPM). You can install NPM with Homebrew. With NPM installed and from inside the Sprinkles project root run:

npm install

This is the Ruby equivalent of running bundle install. Now you can run the following tasks individually:

  • grunt concat
  • grunt jshint
  • grunt qunit
  • grunt uglify

Unfortunately, the tests don't currently pass from the command line. This is due to the fact that PhantomJS, which drives the headless tests, is not a browser. This means that things like document.cookie and window.location don't behave like you'd expect. It seems sensible that running tests in-browser takes priority over running them from the command line so for now to run them boot up Sprinkles in web server (e.g., python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080) and hit the test file directly (e.g. http://localhost:8080/test/index.html). If you're feeling especially debuggy, run grunt test from the console.

When you're done with a feature, you should semantically increment the version number in package.json and run grunt build to update the distribution files.