Over the weekend I was working on a small project and needed a copy of jQuery. I try to avoid the CDN as I find myself at airports without wifi access sometimes so I did what I normally do:

• Go to jQuery.com
• Click the download link
• Click for the latest minified version
• Right click, save as

That's what I always do - but it kinda bugs me. I had heard of a tool called Bower that I thought might help. It's a package manager for the web. In theory, it would do what I wanted. I went to the command line, installed it via npm (have I said before how much npm rocks?), and then fetched a copy of jQuery like so: bower install jquery.

This worked - and it was epic cool - until I realized how much it grabbed...

Ugh. Don't get me wrong - this was still quicker then my old process. And I "get" the idea behind the metadata involved here and why it would be useful in the future. Bower is pretty damn powerful and I definitely recommend folks take a look at it.

But what if you just want a copy of the library, one time, and that's it?

I decided to whip up a quick Brackets extension as a proof of concept. Clicking the "Run JSDownloader" menu option opens up a dialog of options:

Clicking the library fires off a process to download it:

And yeah... that's it. Simple, direct, exactly what I need. There's a few caveats though.

Right now it only supports "single file" downloads. I've got basic architecture in there to support a list of files, but it isn't complete. The idea is that if you provide a list of files, it will create a subdirectory based on the name of the library (as in: currentdir/jqueryui/) and then copy the resources there. But this isn't complete yet because...

The second issue is that Brackets still doesn't support binary file writes in extensions. In theory I could do so if I hook up a Node module to my extension, but... honestly it feels like a bit much. I'd rather just wait a bit and hope for support in a future sprint.

Finally, there is no support in Brackets yet for refreshing the project view. So while the extension certainly works, you need to do a reload to see the files show up.

So - where did that last of four projects come from? This is kinda cool I think. In order to "drive" the data list, my extension reads from a simple JSON packet. Here's how it looks now:

[
  {"key":"jquery","name":"jQuery 2.0","file":"http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.0.min.js"},
	{"key":"handlebars","name":"Handlebars 1.0.0 rc3","file":"https://raw.github.com/wycats/handlebars.js/1.0.0-rc.3/dist/handlebars.runtime.js"},
	{"key":"underscore","name":"Underscore 1.4.4","file":"http://underscorejs.org/underscore-min.js"},
	{"key":"zepto","name":"Zepto 1.0", "file":"http://zeptojs.com/zepto.min.js"}
]

While this file is in the extension itself, my code reads the GitHub version of it instead:

var JSDownloader = (function() {
    
  var INDEX_URL = "https://raw.github.com/cfjedimaster/brackets-jsdownloader/master/jsdownloader_index.json";
	var INDEX_KEY = "jsdownloader.index";
	//Number of minutes to cache
	var CACHE_LEN = 1000*60*60*24;
	var index;

	return {

		getIndex:function() {
			var raw = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem(INDEX_KEY));
			return raw.index;
		},

		hasCachedIndex:function() {
			var cache = localStorage.getItem(INDEX_KEY);
			if(!cache) return false;
			var ob = JSON.parse(cache);
			var then = new Date(ob.created);
			var now = new Date();
			if((now.getTime() - then.getTime()) > CACHE_LEN) return false;
			return true;
		},

		loadIndex:function(cb) {
			$.get(INDEX_URL, {}, function(res,code) {
				console.dir(res);
				var ob = {};
				ob.created = new Date();
				ob.index = res;
				localStorage.setItem(INDEX_KEY, JSON.stringify(ob));
				cb();
			},"json");

		} 

	};
    
}());

This means folks could add a new library by just committing to my GitHub repo. I don't have a nice UI to refresh the cache, but if folks end up using and contributing to this extension, I'll add it.

Download/Fork the code here: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/brackets-jsdownloader