JAVA SCRIPT - Hosting Your Library

Hosting Your Library

Problem

You want to open source your code, but you don’t want to have to maintain the libraries on your own server.

Solution

Use one of the source code sites to host your code, and provide the tools to manage collaboration with other developers.

EXPLAIN 

One of the beautiful things about JavaScript is that many of the libraries and applications are open source, which means that not only are they typically free to use, but you can also adapt the library with your innovations, or even collaborate on the original. I strongly encourage open sourcing your libraries as much as possible. 

However, unless you have the resources to mount a public-facing source code control system, you’ll want to use one of the sites that provide support for open source applications. One source code host is Google Code, which contains a simple user interface to start a new project and upload code. You can choose between two version control software systems (Subversion and Mercurial), as well as one of a host of open source licenses. 

There is a wiki component to each project where you can provide documentation, as well as a way to provide updates for those interested in the project. The site also provides issue-tracking software for people to file bugs in addition to a download link and a separate link for source code. 

The SVG-enabling software SVGWeb is hosted in Google Code.shows the front page for the project and the links to all of the secondary support pages, including the Wiki, Downloads, Issues, Source, and so on.

There is no charge for hosting an application on Google Code. Another very popular host for open source projects is GitHub. Unlike Google Code, there are limits to what is supported for a free account on the service, but JavaScript libraries should not tax these limits. You shouldn’t incur any costs, as long as your projects are open source and publicly available. 

However, there is a fee if you want to use the service for a private collaboration with several others. As with Google Code, GitHub supports source code control and collaboration from several people, including records of issues, downloads, a wiki support page, and a nice graphs page that provides graphics of language support, usage, and other interesting indicators. 

The very popular jQuery library is hosted on GitHub, though you can download jQuery from its own domain. Node and most Node modules are also hosted by GitHub. 

GitHub is based on Git, an open source, source code control system. You typically install Git locally and manage your project in GitHub via Git. There are Git client applications for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Git is usually accessed via the command line. When setting it up, the first thing you’ll do is introduce yourself to it—providing a name that is used to label all commits:

git config --global user.name "name"

Next, you’ll need to sign up for a GitHub account, providing an email you’ll use with Git to connect your local environment with the hub:

git config --global user.email "email address"

At this point, you can do a variety of tasks, including setting up a repository, as well as participating in other GitHub-hosted projects