My colleagues at Bool have developed a new JavaScript framework for SharePoint – sharepoint utilities. It started on our DevDay last year – a whole free day when we could learn new things, try out new techniques or build something that was not even requested from a customer. I was not working on sharepoint utilities, so I almost forgot it until…
I recently re-discovered sharepoint utilities. It is on Github, it is MIT licensed and contributions are welcome. The core of sharepoint utilities (sputils) is a set of wrappers for Search, TermStore, REST that allow you be more productive as a developer.
What I find especially compelling with that it contains some other fundamental stuff that every SharePoint developer needs:
- XHR, you only need to use sputils.rest.get or sputils.rest.post to make Ajax requests to SharePoint, no need for jQuery or sprequestexecutor.js
- Promise, it contains a minimalist Promise framework – no need for jQuery.Deferred. All calls to SharePoint _api are wrapped in promises. So there is a better way of making calls to SharePoint.
- DateTime, it contains some useful functions for working with dates and time.
- Functional JavaScript. No need for underscore.js or lodash.js.
To me, XHR and Promises are two important parts that I need in every solution. So instead of linking jQuery and preparing reusable XHR functions for SharePoint, I’d recommend using sharepoint-utilities.
