Building Polyfills

Chapter 4. Building Your First Polyfill, Part 2: Build Workflows and Cross-Browser Testing

In Chapter 3, you got your first taste of cross-browser polyfill development via the construction of an HTML5 Forms polyfill. We managed to cover a lot of ground in a short time, but there’s no doubt that our polyfill is missing some critical pieces. Some of these relate to our build and deploy process, while others relate to improving the quality and performance of the code itself with some unit and performance tests. Over these next two chapters, we’ll round out the construction of our first polyfill. In this chapter, we’ll cover the ins and outs of setting up your build process and performing automated testing. Then, in Chapter 5, we’ll discuss how to deal with hairy edge cases in a spec, and testing/refactoring for performance.

Setting Up Your Project Workflow

In Chapter 3, we got right to work building our polyfill without considering much beyond simple project and source control setup. At this point, I’d like to back up and discuss some important workflow considerations that polyfill developers should address when starting up a project. Specifically, we want to begin with the end in mind. That is, before we write a single line of code, we should think about how we plan to distribute our hard work, and how we expect other developers to leverage our polyfill in their apps, and even how we can enable others to contribute to our project. All of these considerations can be addressed at the ...