(done) The journey to rewrite SlickGrid to pure/vanilla JS

[ghiscoding]

Here's the list of changes that are required and were done over the past couple years to convert SlickGrid to pure JS. It's a very long journey that I seem to be the only one working on it. It span over several years because of its complexity

• convert all Editors & Filters to pure JS
  • Autocomplete (moved from jQueryUI to Kraaden Autocomplete in 2.x)
  • Date (using Flatpickr)
  • Checkbox Editor
  • Long Text Editor (textarea)
  • Regular Input
  • Slider Range (moved from jQueryUI to pure JS)
  • Select dropdown is the only 1 remaining and for this one I forked and rewrote multiple-select.JS into a pure JS lib
    • see multiple-selec-vanilla
    • this is pretty much done but will not be released until jQuery removal is completed (ref PR feat!: drop jQuery requirement #962)
• convert all Plugins & Controls to pure JS
  • had to move all original SlickGrid into Slickgrid-Universal, rewrote them in pure JS and added full unit tests coverage for them
  • this exercise took 5 months to complete
• remove jQueryUI (done in v2.0.0)
  • removed jQueryUI, however note that it now requires SortableJS for the lib to work
• remove jQuery from SlickGrid (slick.grid.js) (done in v3.0.0)
  • this is definitely the hardest one, the file has over 6000 lines of code all written in jQuery code, which will probably increase the number of lines in pure JS by a lot too
  • I'm not sure if it will ever happen, it will take considerable time
  • the work has started to drop jQuery completely from SlickGrid core lib, see SlickGrid v4.0 Announcement & Migration
  • We should then get it working in Slickgrid-Universal, this was actually achieved in PR feat!: drop jQuery requirement #962 but requires a new version from core SlickGrid
  • next major version should bump required version of Node to >=16.15.0 and NPM >=8.5.0
• drop SlickGrid dependency completely and make Slickgrid-Universal completely standalone (done in v4.0.0)

File Size Comparisons

Comparing with the folder properties with "size on disk" on Windows

Slickgrid-Universal

File	before	after	diff	% diff
SF Bundle Zip File	624Kb (638,976)	596Kb (610,304)	28Kb	4.48% smaller
GitHub Vite Demo Website	4.99Mb (5,234,688)	4.72Mb (4,956,160)	0.27Mb (or 272Kb)	4.07% smaller

Angular-Slickgrid

File	before	after	diff	% diff
GitHub Demo Website	9.24Mb (9,695,232)	8.76Mb (9,187,328)	0.48Mb	5.24% smaller
JS Bundle	8.14Mb / 1.39Mb (gzip)	7.65Mb / 1.32Mb (gzip)	0.49Mb / 0.07Mb	9.21% / 5.03%