jquery/web-learn-jquery-com — Issue #27: Solution For Handling Exercises
Author: addyosmani
Created: 2011-10-22 19:15:00+00:00
State: open

This is a discussion on how we aim to handle integrating the jQuery fundamentals exercises as a part of the new learning site.

On our last call we discussed a few options including having a gist/repo to jsFiddle hook (similar to what @divya/nimbupani previously mentioned) so that exercises can be maintained under source control but still offer the benefits of fiddle editing for those that wish to play around with the code examples.

If we did opt to go down that path, there are few different questions we need to answer like:

How are these going to be presented to the end user? - having access to both gists and fiddles means that we could either opt to embed gists (which come with GitHub forkability) vs embedded fiddles (which can be forked and run live).

My personal view is that the fiddles offer more value here for embeds, but this comes with an added reliance on jsFiddle.com staying live. As many of us know, the service has been prone to periods of large downtime/slowness lately and I think we need to consider the pro's of what the service allows us to do vs. the possibility of pages hanging waiting on fiddles to load up.

A possible solution to this is using something (embedded gists, js syntax highlighted code samples) to display code samples on pages and then just a jsFiddle link (generated based on the hook) below the sample so that users can play with it if they want to. This would avoid any hanging issues.

I'd like to hear what others thing about these ideas. Would the last point offer the best balance? If not, do you have any alternative suggestions?