Practical approach to keeping jQuery up to date?

Question

Some of the projects we\'re working on have strong roots in jQuery 1.4.2 or earlier, and somewhere between lacking the performance edge (or syntactic sugar) of the latest re

Answer 1

You will always be outdated. Once you are done updating to the latest version, a newer one will come out a few months later.

Unless you are willing to put hours/days/weeks of development, testing and bugfixing, with the possibility of breaking user-facing functionality, you shouldn't be updating just to use the newest way of declaring event handlers. It won't hurt you. And normally this is a risky thing to do. This translates into dev team costs. You already know this. Refactoring, especially when there is no evident risk for the project, is in general hard to justify to managers. And you should double check your thoughts to be sure if having the new jQuery in code that is already working will make any difference.

Now, if you are working on creating new pages in an existing site, you could be including a new version in those areas. But, this will have a consequence: lets assume that you and your team, apart from developing the new part of the site, also have to maintain the part that is using the old one. Everybody will need to be aware of the specific version of jQuery they are writing their code against.

So, to close, I would say something like this. Unless there is real justifiable risk for the project to be delayed or to be technically blocked because of an older jQuery version, you are going to be getting into trouble for breaking something that is already working and will need to put extra hours just to make everything work as well as it was working before.

Anyway, this approach doesn't mean that you could start separating the 'new sections' from the old ones, and using the newest libraries in the new areas.