WebReflection PureDom baseline for TaskSpeed

I just had a quick and nice chat with Peter E Higgins and I am proud to announce that my PureDom test has been integrated into TaskSpeed test suite.

Why PureDom

We all know how many benefits libraries give us on daily basis about Web 2.0 supersonic development, but as both libraries author and users, we should pay attention.
Web Developers: sometime we delegate to our cool library some simple task which could be easily implemented manually. If performances are a problem we should use libraries only when and if necessary. There are a lot of best practices for each library and all we need to do is to read these practices to be sure our way to code is of course elegant, but not silly.

// this is silly
$("#items li.selected").each(function(){
    $(this).css("color", "red");
    $(this).css("background", "blue");
    $(this).width($(this).parent().width());
});

// ... while this makes sense
$("#items li.selected").each(function(){

    // cache the magic object
    var $this = $(this);

    // use full lib features, avoid redundant code
    $this.css({color:"red", background:"blue"});

    $this.width($this.parent().width());
});

Libraries Authors: our main purpose is to define a standard within the library logic and behavior to obtain best "results in zero efforts". Sometimes we could think about light layers between our super cool high level method and pure DOM in order to preserve performances for basic tasks. We all know the most problematic and slow browser, version whatever, is still Internet Explorer, and obviously more we overload the library for this browser, worse the latter one will perform. I hope the PureDom baseline will help all of us to compare results, specially for simple tasks where even the code size is not that different between the chosen lib and the manual DOM execution.

Tricky Monkey, but this is NOT "Python vs ASM"

I know some PureDom task could be interpreted as a "cheat" but honestly, what I have done, was simply follow instructions to create the result. That is my meaning of manual task implementation, and that is why libraries will have hard time against first column. It does not matter if libraries are slower than pure DOM, and it is quite obvious they will be slower, but more these libraries will be close to DOM results more advantages we will have using that library rather than the other one (more competition as well and we like it!)

Have fun with Web development and JavaScript! ;)