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Request Has Been Deprecated

Songtham Tung
Better Programming
Published in
2 min readFeb 13, 2020
Photo from npm.

As of February 11, 2020, one of the biggest NPM packages — Request — has been officially deprecated.

This popular library has been around for more than a decade, with the first version released in 2009. Since then, it has received more than 16 million weekly downloads and more than 47,000 libraries are dependent on it.

Why Would the Author Stop Development?

In his own words, original author Mikeal Rogers stated:

“The most valuable thing Request can do for the JavaScript ecosystem is to go into maintenance mode and stop considering new features or major releases.”

With the emergence of modern JavaScript and newer design patterns, Rogers was faced with a tough choice:

  1. Ride the wave of change
  2. Deprecate

At first, Rogers thought he could adapt, but he ultimately chose the latter and goes on to say that “The patterns at the core of request are out of date.” Instead of surviving through the transition, the author…

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Songtham Tung
Songtham Tung

Written by Songtham Tung

Technical Account Manager | 1M+ Reads | 🇺🇸🇹🇭

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