TKO (“Technical Knockout”)

TKO houses the monorepo of Knockout.

Getting Started

To install use one of the usual package managers e.g.

• $ yarn add @tko/build.reference
• $ npm install @tko/build.reference

Over CDN

• Reference Build: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tko/build.reference@4.0.0-alpha8/dist/build.reference.min.js

Knockout Build

The Knockout build has some backwards compatibility that is not in the reference build. See the build differences, here: https://tko.io/3to4

It's available as @tko/build.knockout, and over CDN:

• Knockout Build https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tko/build.knockout@4.0.0-alpha8/dist/build.knockout.min.js

Using the Monorepo

Command	Effect
$ git clone git@github.com:knockout/tko	Clone the repository.
$ npm install -g yarn otherwise	Ensure yarn is globally available
$ yarn	Install local node packages and link tko modules
$ yarn test	Run all tests. See below.
$ yarn watch	Run all tests and watch for changes. See below.
$ yarn build	Build tko[.module][.es6][.min].js files, where .es6 version has not been transpiled
$ lerna publish	Bump versions and publish to npm registry

Checkout package.json => scripts for more commands that can be executed with yarn {command}.

In each individual packages/*/ directory, you can also run (presuming rollup and karma are installed globally):

Command	Effect
$ karma COMMAND ../../karma.conf.js [--once]	Test the local package, where COMMAND is e.g. start or run
$ rollup -c ../../rollup.config.js	Build the package into the local dist/

Testing with yarn test and yarn watch

The yarn test and yarn watch commands can be used in the root directory, where it will run across all tests, or alternatively in any packages/*/ directory to run tests specific to that package.

Optional arguments to yarn test include:

• --sauce — use Sauce Labs to test a variety of platforms; requires an account at Sauce Labs and SAUCE_USERNAME and SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY to be set in the environment.
• --noStartConnect — Do not start a new Sauce Connect proxy instance for every test; requires that Sauce Connect be already running.

visual.html

Note that running karma or rollup will create a visual.html file that shows the proportional size of imports into each package.

Objectives

TKO aims to become a base for future versions of Knockout. The objectives include:

• Modularization into ES6 and separate projects, with compilation using an ES6 compiler like Rollup. This solves several problems with Knockout, including:
  • Some folks want to roll-their-own with e.g. removing components
  • Compilation is now with Closure compiler, which is actually transliterating – meaning the debug and minified versions have different code paths (mostly in the form of things exposed in debug being missing in the minified version)
  • The compilation of Knockout is just concatenation, leading to difficulties with maintainance, severance, and replacement
• Documentation inline in the source code. This aims to make it easier to document, by making documentation adjacent to the code about-which it speaks. Also, we aim to have examples in the documentation.
• A more comprehensive home page. The hope is to have something fun and fancy, and we have a rough prototype.
• Better setup for plugins. The problems with Knockout include:
  • There's no central, searchable repository for knockout
  • What should be simple plugins (e.g. binding handlers or providers) are complex, including:
    • Built-ins have first-class access to quite a bit of good Knockout code, but plugins generally have second-class access and often have to duplicate Knockout internals
    • Quality plugins have lots of boilerplate for compilation, release, documentation, and testing

Next steps

There's an issue for that.

License

MIT license - http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php.

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