Question

I’ve already run into clients running 1.3 code, when my work relied on 1.4’s much improved features.

Yet these clients don’t have the resources to update their old code …

Example: The client refers to jQuery 1.3 in their site’s template, but I’d really rather use 1.4 for my code and not have to try and use the older version.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this problem?

Edit: The ideal solution would be totally JS … no server-side code as the client prefers it that way.

Answer 1

Try and make the clients aware that the “resources” needed are typically pretty light. Converting to a new version is usually a very quick process, unless they had a lot of erroneous code that was allowed before, but incorrect.

Have them take a look at the release notes for 1.4, and for that matter 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, the benefits of the upgrade far outweigh the time it takes to upgrade in every case I’ve come across. The only caveat to this is in the 1.4 upgrade specifically, the added JSON strictness. From the 1.4 release notes:

jQuery 1.3 and earlier used JavaScript’s eval to evaluate incoming JSON. jQuery 1.4 uses the native JSON parser if available. It also validates incoming JSON for validity, so malformed JSON (for instance {foo: "bar"}) will be rejected by jQuery in jQuery.getJSON and when specifying “json” as the dataType of an Ajax request.

This means JSON operations are much faster, but old/invalid JSON won’t cut it. If they have to go fixing web-services because the JSON has to be absolutely valid in 1.4+, this could be a show-stopper on an upgrade for a large project…and I’m not sure what to tell you on that one.

As for plugins…every major/popular plugin supports new releases very quickly, if not they’re pretty quick to fix yourself…and many just don’t need any editing at all, because they weren’t broken by the upgrade (still, check for new versions of a plugin, they may get performance boosts from a new version of core).