What is TailorJS?

TailorJS is a library for helping you build adaptive web sites. An adaptive web site enables a greater range of designs based on the user's browser's capabilities. TailorJS helps you take advantage of those capabilities and adjust on the server-side as needed.

What problems does TailorJS solve?

TailorJS addresses several challenges with building modern, fast web sites.

TailorJS helps you save on bandwidth costs

If your site is hosted "in the cloud", there is a chance you have to pay for bandwidth costs. If your site only returns the content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc) that's needed, you will use less bandwidth. Using less bandwidth means lower cost.

TailorJS empowers you to configure "layouts" to adapt on the fly. A layout specifies different views of a same page. For example, imagine a user visiting your site at "http://www.mysite.com/welcome". You may want to show one view if they visit from their laptop and another if they are on their phone. TailorJS provides a "hook" that allows you to respond acoordingly on the server. This is different than a responsive site where all of the code gets downloaded at once.

TailorJS helps you improve performance

Your web site will be downloaded faster because you are only returning the content that is required. Once downloaded, your web site will render faster. The reason why is because your site will only have to load the content that's needed.

TailorJS helps you get more info about the browser to the server.

When a user visits your website, some information is shared with the server. However, some of that information is missing. For example, the width and height of the user's browser.

TailorJS provides an easy to use label to work with the width. Instead of some pixel value, TailorJS goes one step further. TailorJS looks at the CSS framework you're using and then communicates the layout to your server.

What other features does TailorJS have?

TailorJS has several other subtle features to help you build adaptive web sites.

Pre-Configured Layouts

TailorJS has reviewed several CSS frameworks to help map between their breakpoints and common layout approaches. While these are preconfigured, mapping the layouts yourself as described in the Configuring TailorJS section below.

Bootstrap

TailorJS has been pre-configured with support for the following versions of Bootstrap. In the event you are using a version that TailorJS does not support, the 'Default' values will be used.

Version	Mobile Layout	Portrait Layout	Landscape
4.0.0-alpha	< 768	< 992	>= 992
3.3.5	< 768	< 992	>= 992
Default	< 768	< 992	>= 992

Foundation

TailorJS has been pre-configured with support for the following versions of Zurb's Foundation framework. In the event you are using a version that TailorJS does not support, the 'Default' values will be used.

Version	Mobile Layout	Portrait Layout	Landscape
?	< 641	< 1025	>= 1025
Default	< 641	< 1025	>= 1025

Default

If you do not configure TailorJS with the name of a supported framework, the default values will be used. Those are:

Mobile Layout	Portrait Layout	Landscape Layout
< 640	< 1024	>= 1024

Query String Fallback

TailorJS uses cookies to communicate to the server which layout is in use. However, if the user has cookies disabled in their browser, TailorJS will pass the value through a parameter that will be placed in the query string.

Detects geo location abilities

TailorJS uses a token to let the server know whether the user's browser has geolocation capabilities.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Here are some of the questions asked about TailorJS

Using TailorJS

To use TailorJS you can follow the step-by-step instructions below or look at it all together.

Step-by-Step

To use TailorJS in your web app, do the following:

1. Add the TailorJS library If you like bower, use bower install tailorjs

If you prefer npm, use npm install tailorjs --save-dev

2. Reference TailorJS in your web page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="./tailor.js" />

3. Configure Tailor.js TailorJS relies on JSON for configuration. An example configuration can be found here:

tailor.configure({ layout: { framework: 'bootstrap', version: '4.0.0-alpha' });

A complete list of the available configuration options are described in the "Configuring TailorJS" section below.

4. Tailor your page when the window resizes. Notice the lack of () after tailor.

window.onresize = tailor;

All Together

<script type="text/javascript" src="./tailor.js" />
<script type="text/javascript">
  tailor.configure({ layout: { framework: 'bootstrap', version: '4.0.0-alpha' });
  window.onresize = tailor;
</script>

Configuring TailorJS

TailorJS provides you with a variety Configuring TailorJS involves using the following values:

abilities

gps

The following properties are configurable on the gps object.

Property Name	Default Value	Description
tokenName	isGpsAvailable	The name of the cookie or query string parameter that stores whether the browser supports geolocation.
isAvailable	null	A flag that signals if the browser has geolocation abilities. This is used to help minimize reloads while still giving the server what it needs.
refreshOnAvailabilityChange	true	A flag that signals if the page should be reloaded if geolocation support is detected, but was not previously identified.

layout

The following properties are configurable on the layout object.

Property Name	Default Value	Description
framework	null	Identifies the CSS framework that is in use in the browser. Supported values include: bootstrap, foundation, and custom
version	null	The version of the framework that is in use in the browser. This value should match a version listed by running bower info [framework name]. If TailorJS does not specifically support the given value, it will fallback.
resizeThreshold	200	This is the number of milliseconds to wait when a user is refreshing their browser. This is to help keep performance up.
supported	['mobile', 'portrait', 'landscape']	An array of supported layouts. At this time, three values are required here. If you only have two layouts, you could use ['mobile', 'laptop', 'laptop'] if need be. One of the values from this array is what will be available to the server via a cookie or query string parameter identifed by tokenName below.
current	null	The current layout in use. This should be one of the values listed in the supported list.
tokenName	layout	The name of the cookie or query string parameter that stores the name of the current layout used on the client-side.

Contributing to TailorJS

TailorJS is available for contribution. As new responsive frameworks (and versions of existing frameworks) emerge, it may make sense to update this library to include them. The definitions of the frameworks are defined in the tailor.supported object.

Branching TailorJS

TailorJS uses the GitHub Flow workflow.

Developing in TailorJS

[TODO]

Building TailorJS

gulp gulp deploy