TL;DR: in the upcoming weeks and months, I plan to upgrade the scripts
generated to "use strict" and to make use of ECMAScript 2015 and later
syntax.
---
I've been making changes to ruby2js in the past week or so to support
features added to Javascript since 2009. All browsers from IE 10 on
support "use strict", and the major browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and
Safari) support ES2017.
Enabling these changes is as simple as "require 'ruby2js/strict'" and/or
"require 'ruby2js/es2017'". I don't plan on adding those statements
until after I have run some tests. I also don't plan on changing the
board agenda tool until after this month's meeting. Should we need to
revert the changes (either temporarily or permanently), all we will have
to do is change back to "require 'ruby2js'".
In my opinion, all whimsy tools (particularly the one that run under
passenger) should be upgraded to "use strict". As I believe that it is
unlikely that the secretary workbench will be used with IE 11, I believe
that it is safe to update that tool to ES2017.
Some links outlining the changes:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Strict_mode
https://babeljs.io/learn-es2015/
---
Early explorations with the board agenda tool have identified some
problematic code; things that work, but aren't quite right. As an
example, it seems that with the current code, 'color' is a computed
property (more specifically a 'getter') that use used to determine the
color of the top and bottom banners. Despite not having a setter, the
code does assign this value, which without either having strict on or
using ES2015 classes will overwrite the getter.
Having JavaScript enforce the desired semantics will result in more
maintainable code.
- Sam Ruby
