How to choose a third party package

• react-loadable

  6 16,595 0.0 JavaScript

  :hourglass_flowing_sand: A higher order component for loading components with promises.

  It's very important that you are choosing an active project instead of a dead/unmaintained project. An active project improves over time through community feedback. An unmaintained project does not move forward, fix functional bugs or patch security issues. Sometimes, a very popular package can be abandoned and go into a "frozen" state with many open issues and pull requests. It might have been a great solution in the past, but this is a sign that we have to move on. An example is react-loadable. It was a great solution for a very long time for code-splitting in React. I totally loved it. But it's stale now with many issues and PRs since 2018 (this post is written at the end of 2021). Now, if I need to split code in React, I use loadable-components, which is in active development, becoming more popular, patches bugs reported by the community, and most importantly, solves my problems. My personal advice: choose a package that's active in the last 3-6 months, with issues that are being resolved and PRs that are being merged.

• loadable-components

  12 7,523 5.4 JavaScript

  The recommended Code Splitting library for React ✂️✨

  It's very important that you are choosing an active project instead of a dead/unmaintained project. An active project improves over time through community feedback. An unmaintained project does not move forward, fix functional bugs or patch security issues. Sometimes, a very popular package can be abandoned and go into a "frozen" state with many open issues and pull requests. It might have been a great solution in the past, but this is a sign that we have to move on. An example is react-loadable. It was a great solution for a very long time for code-splitting in React. I totally loved it. But it's stale now with many issues and PRs since 2018 (this post is written at the end of 2021). Now, if I need to split code in React, I use loadable-components, which is in active development, becoming more popular, patches bugs reported by the community, and most importantly, solves my problems. My personal advice: choose a package that's active in the last 3-6 months, with issues that are being resolved and PRs that are being merged.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io

  sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• Highcharts JS

  46 11,810 10.0 TypeScript

  Highcharts JS, the JavaScript charting framework

  

  Let's take an example. If you are working with charts, you might have heard of Highcharts - a rock-solid and incredibly flexible charting library made for developers. You download it from npm, make a chart, it looks great, and you are ready to roll out the feature. But please note that Highcharts is not free for commercial use. So if you are writing code for your company and your company hasn't bought a license to use this package in production, you are basically breaking the law. We don't want that, right? So please buy a license before using Highcharts in production. Myself, I use Recharts instead, a free package powered by D3 with MIT license and in very active development.

• recharts

  35 22,349 9.7 TypeScript

  Redefined chart library built with React and D3

  

  Let's take an example. If you are working with charts, you might have heard of Highcharts - a rock-solid and incredibly flexible charting library made for developers. You download it from npm, make a chart, it looks great, and you are ready to roll out the feature. But please note that Highcharts is not free for commercial use. So if you are writing code for your company and your company hasn't bought a license to use this package in production, you are basically breaking the law. We don't want that, right? So please buy a license before using Highcharts in production. Myself, I use Recharts instead, a free package powered by D3 with MIT license and in very active development.

• d3

  277 107,600 8.4 Shell

  Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML. :bar_chart::chart_with_upwards_trend::tada:

  

  Let's take an example. If you are working with charts, you might have heard of Highcharts - a rock-solid and incredibly flexible charting library made for developers. You download it from npm, make a chart, it looks great, and you are ready to roll out the feature. But please note that Highcharts is not free for commercial use. So if you are writing code for your company and your company hasn't bought a license to use this package in production, you are basically breaking the law. We don't want that, right? So please buy a license before using Highcharts in production. Myself, I use Recharts instead, a free package powered by D3 with MIT license and in very active development.

• DOMPurify

  42 12,766 8.5 JavaScript

  DOMPurify - a DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG. DOMPurify works with a secure default, but offers a lot of configurability and hooks. Demo:

  As mentioned in Fit your need, many packages try to solve a general problem (thus the size of the package is large). You may only need a small part of the package. Sometimes, your problem is unique and there are no existing third party packages out there that solve it. In those cases, it's a great time for you to do it yourself. I found myself in the early days in the industry spending much time finding a third party package to help me build features. But over time, I more rarely used external packages for my daily tasks. It doesn't mean that I always reinvent the wheel. It means that I know what I am doing and I can seek help from the community when I truly need to (for example I will never sanitize user input by myself, but use DOMPurify)

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