The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle it basically consist in the following:
Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.
That said, it’s almost clear that the DRY principle is against the code duplication, something that in the long-term affect the maintenance phase, it doesn’t facilitate the improvement or code refactoring and, in some cases, it can generate some contradictions, among other problems. Recently I have inherited a project, and one of the things that I noticed in some part of the source code are the following:
After a glance, you can save some bytes and apply the facade and module pattern without breaking the API compatibility in this way:
But, if you have read the jQuery documentation it’s obvious that the
previous code portions are against the DRY principle, basically, this functions
expose some shorthands for the $.ajax method from the jQuery library. That
said, it’s important to clarify that jQuery, from version 1.0, offers some
shorthands, they are: $.get(), $.getJSON(), $.post(), among others.
So, in this particular case, I prefer to break the backward compatibility and delete the previous code portions. After that, I changed the code that used the previous functions and from this point I only used the shorthand that jQuery offers, some examples may clarify this thought:
Another advantage of using the shorthand methods that jQuery provides is that
you can work with Deferreds, one last thing that we must take in consideration
is that jqXHR.success() and jqXHR.error() callback methods are deprecated
as of jQuery 1.8.
Anyway, I wanted to share my experience in this case. Also, remark that we need to take care of some principles at the moment we develop software and avoid to reinvent the wheel or do overengineering.
Last but not least, one way to read offline documentation that I tend to use is Dash or Zeal, I can reach a bunch of documentation without the need of an Internet connection, give it a try!