The Sourcerer

Cixar Javascript Library and Names

The name "Cixar Javascript Library", or CJL, has numerous virtues. It has a three letter acronym, a full name long enough to asphyxiate a cheetah, conjures absolutely no mental image, nor alludes to any works of art or literature.

I'd like to announce that, having rigorously contemplated the issue from a vantage about two feet above my naval (that is, half of a meter for our dear friends huddled safely distant from the sanity interference field), I've decided to name the Cixar Javascript Library. My requirements are succinct:

• one word,
• allegorical, preferably ambiguous,
• eminently brandable,
• subtly humorous,
• an alternate spelling in Unicode,
• If possible, the name must enamour an attractive girl no more than five years older or younger than me before Monday.

I browsed Wikipedia and discovered Ajax's centaur tutor, Chiron. So, there you have it, the library's name is Chiron. I leave it as an exercise for the reader and my fate/doom to discover whether it will suffice. However, I will explicitly state that brandability is fulfilled. Chiron, it turns out (back me up on this, Wikipedia), was really half-cow, the only Centauren to grace the Hellenic Pantheon.

For prospective users of Chiron, I have a question of nomenclature preference. Use of the Chiron library requires the HTML author to include exactly one script tag in their header, modules.js (13KB shrunk but not compressed). From there the author can opt to use whatever modules they will.

Central to the Chiron library is a module currently called javascript.js that contains exceptions (KeyError), the type system (type), common types (Dict, List, Iter), and a wealth of common functions (forEach, stripEnd) (currently 36KB shrunk but not compressed). Since I would like to give the user the option of not loading this module, most modules explicitly include it, even though in a language like Python, these primitives would be implicitly available.

I called the module javascript.js since it would include primitives that in Python would be part of the language. In Python, this module would probably be called __builtins__.py. In any other Javascript library, precedent suggests that that module would be called base.js.

Which of the following should I call this module of language primitives?

• javascript.js,
• builtins.js,
• base.js,
• your idea here.

Please send me an email and weigh in.

Javascript and Load Time

I conducted a quick experiment to assess whether it is worth worrying about the size and distribution of Javascript modules. I gathered the following numbers on my Linux box at home (fast) connected to Cixar (fast) over my home Internet connection (average today).

ping cixar.com	30ms
ping google.com	80ms
HTTP overhead	30ms
bandwidth	0.1KB/ms
patience	1500ms
maximum size	150KB
Chiron core	100KB
Chiron core shrunk	50KB
Chiron core shrunk compressed	13KB

I've decided not to worry about the size or distribution of Chiron until its core is five times bigger.