Jails 6 — Codename: Poseidon

Excited to announce the launch of the new Jails version! 🎉

Poseidon — God of the sea — A.I Generated

I’ve always been fascinated by Greek mythology, so for each major version of Jails, I’ve used a Greek mythological figure as the codename. It helps me remember each version better than just using numbers.

From the very beginning, Jails has been all about simplicity — that’s been my top priority since the earliest versions. The goal was to streamline everything I used to do in Vanilla JavaScript while embracing modern concepts, technologies, and best practices. But more than that, Jails is about building applications with less code, making development faster and more efficient.

The Community’s Hard Choices

Developers often face a common dilemma when choosing the best approach to start projects or build applications — they tend to live on the extremes.

On one side, we have bloated frameworks that introduce multiple layers of abstraction, tightly coupling the system to a specific solution. On the other hand, emerging libraries take a different approach by extending HTML rather than adding abstraction layers. While this is an interesting idea, it mixes a declarative markup language with logic, leading to tools like Alpine and htmx. These either make the code messy or shift UX complexity to the backend team — who may not be interested in dealing with UI concerns on the server side.

Then there’s the topic of Web Components, which emerges as a potential solution. However, developers must still choose between using vanilla Web Components or adopting a library — some of which are even more complex than traditional frameworks.

In the end, we remain stuck with hard choices, always at the extremes.

The Happy Medium library

What about the middle ground? Why isn’t anyone looking for an alternative that empowers us to be productive without forcing us to commit to the complexity of a heavy framework?

This is the space Jails aims to fill. Jails is about empowering Vanilla JavaScript development, allowing you to focus on learning the platform itself rather than the framework. It’s all about simplicity and being straightforward.

Version 6 continues with the same motivation as its predecessors: to introduce minimal breaking changes, remove abstractions that haven’t proven their worth over time, and add features that enhance simplicity and productivity.

The Version 6 Mentality

Jails is more than just a project — it’s a product. This means I need to dedicate more energy not only to making the core ideas of Jails accessible to everyone, but also to ensuring its visibility. That’s a challenge, especially for developers, as we’re great at programming and building things but often struggle with marketing.

Marketing is about selling your product and convincing people that they should at least take a closer look at what you’re offering.

One effective way to do this is by capitalizing on a trend. It’s a great way to attract attention, and it’s highly effective. The trend I want to focus on is Web Components. But this isn’t just a marketing move — it’s also a natural progression for Jails. In the previous versions, Jails was already moving in that direction by leveraging the Custom Elements API lifecycle and experimenting with features that enabled fully featured, shareable components across projects.

While the earlier versions of Jails were focused on simplifying how we add behavior to web applications, Version 6 shifts its focus towards improving how we share behavior across different applications — drawing inspiration from the principles of distributed systems.

Jails.std — The Jails Standard Library

I draw inspiration from various fields of computer science to help improve the Jails Project. One of the key sources of inspiration has been the concept of the standard library in programming languages.

The standard library of a programming language is a collection of built-in functions, modules, and tools that come with the language by default. It provides essential functionalities like file handling, data structures, math operations, and more, so programmers don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

I know that almost every framework or library these days includes a standard set of features, but often it’s implicit, and it’s all tied to the framework itself. This can lock you into the ecosystem, which benefits the framework or library maintainers — but that’s not what I want for Jails.

So, with Version 6, I created the Jails.std npm package: https://github.com/jails-org/Std.

This package isn’t about Jails — it’s focused on solving common frontend problems. Sometimes we need simple functionalities like:

Triggering an event when an element becomes visible on the page
Debouncing and throttling function calls
Lazy-loading images
A router that syncs with the browser location (pushState or hash)
Retrieving query string parameters from the URL
Storing objects and complex structures in session or localStorage without having to manually use JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify()

And more…

I realized these problems are often more important to solve than the specific issues within a library or framework. Even better, they don’t need to be tightly coupled with a particular framework. So, if you find the Jails.std package useful, feel free to use it — it’s mostly framework-agnostic.

If you think something is missing, let me know, and I’ll keep it updated, or feel free to open a PR yourself!

It’s in beta right now, but it’s official. My next steps are to write unit tests and make it easier for contributors to collaborate. I’ve designed it to be simple, so I hope it becomes a great project for beginners looking to get involved in open source.

Finito

I’m really proud of this version — it’s becoming more robust without being bloated. Each new release is lighter and simpler than the last.

I’ve also made time to improve the documentation. I admit I was a bit careless with that aspect, which is so crucial for newcomers, and I apologize for that.

Feel free to check it out: https://jails-js.org/

Thank you!

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