SweetAlert2 — Mend’s Open Source Project of the Month for January 2019
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Continuing our series of innovative and useful open source projects that you should know, we spoke this month with the creator of SweetAlert2.
First released in January 2015 under the MIT license by Limon Monte, SweetAlert2 is an open source responsive, customizable, and accessible (WAI-ARIA) modern replacement for JavaScript’s popup boxes. It has zero dependencies and is customizable and more responsive than JS. The alerts provide a more visual and personal touch for your team of developers.
According to Limon, “SweetAlert2 is the fork of SweetAlert, which I started three years ago because the original one was unmaintained and I was missing a couple of its features.”After the open source community presented their concern for SweetAlert’s lack of being maintained, Limon says that he decided to create SweetAlert2.
Since launching the latest and greatest update in SweetAlert2, the open source community has latched on as seen through popularity on GitHub. “After three years, SweetAlert2 is now twice as popular as the original one,” says Limon, adding that the main reason is that, “We are maintaining the project and listening to the community.”
Why take their project open source?
Like other open source projects, SweetAlert2 has had its challenges on the way but with challenges you learn to love working on. an open source project.
“I realized what is the responsibility of an open source project,” says Limon in discussing his journey of bringing his project life and maintaining it as a viable component for the community to incorporate into their software. When your project is used in tens of thousands of real-life projects, you do not want to bring any bugs or breaking changes to it. Developers who are using SweetAlert2 can be 100% sure that we will not accidentally break something. We are testing in all platforms and browsers, code coverage is currently 91%. We take responsibility for the delivered quality.”
Limon draws lessons from his work with open source that he tries to apply to other aspects, telling me that, “Taking responsibility is not something we should be afraid of. It’s what makes your life meaningful.”
Working with the community and open source
Over the years we have seen great things get created with the help of the open source community, with SweetAlert2 as a prime example of what can be accomplished. While there is no direct team working on this project, Limon explains that the community is a major factor in the advancement of the project.
“There’s no clear borderline between SweetAlert2 team and open source community,” he says, explaining that, “I lead the project along with team members from the community.”
When asked why Limon loves working with open source, he gratefully responded by saying, “We are all different, we have strong and weak sides. What I love about OSS is that people can combine their strong skills to create high-quality products. Two years ago I created this issue and now there are six more collaborators maintaining the project. All collaborators have admin privileges to the repo.”
We think SweetAlert2 is great for the open source community because it makes it very easy for developers to create custom alert messages to show to their users by simply setting the values of a few properties.
To learn more about the SweetAlert2 project, please visit their GitHub page and try it out for yourself.
How to start working with SweetAlert2
Unlike other open source projects which might be more complex, SweetAlert2 is very simple. First, download it from CDN, then follow the instructions which can be found here.
Fun facts about the creator of SweetAlert2
Limon says that his favorite open source project other than his own is semantic-release/semantic-release because “its maintainer is showing the safe way of maintaining the JS project in the chaotic JS ecosystem. Also, he is providing the battle-tested way of automating the releasing process. We are using semantic-release in SweetAlert2 and its plugins.”
The first coding language that Limon tells us that he learned was Turbo Pascal 7 and his first computer was a Celeron 400 with Windows 98 OS. When asked that question he responded with a wistful “Oh man, this question made me cry because of nostalgia.”
