A toggle is a piece of hardware that allows you to switch something on or off. It is also a common feature in software applications, which can be used to enable or disable functionality. The word toggle is also sometimes used as a verb, to describe the act of switching something on or off. Toggles are used in a wide variety of everyday technology devices, such as smartphones and televisions. They can be found in software applications, as well, such as email and social media apps.
The term toggle was originally used to refer to a pin passed through the eye of a rope to hold it in place, but now it is often used for any kind of switch. In computer technology, the term toggle can be used to refer to a button on a keyboard that turns caps lock on or off. It is also commonly used in software to refer to a button that can be turned on or off, such as the toggle that controls brightness in a digital display.
Toggles are a useful tool for responsive design in web development because they allow you to create features that can be enabled or disabled depending on device type and screen size. When used correctly, these features can improve usability by allowing users to customize the functionality of an application to meet their needs. Toggles can be used to enable or disable navigation menus, sidebars, and other content on desktop computers and mobile devices. They can also be used to create responsive themes for websites and apps that are designed to be compatible with different types of devices.
Aside from their utility in responsive designs, toggles are a great way to manage features in a code base. By using them, you can avoid having to create new branches for every change to the core product. Rather, you can make all of those changes right on trunk and then use toggles to turn them on or off in production. This makes it much easier to test and QA your features and still meet your release deadlines.
Another benefit of toggles is that they can be a great way to avoid making changes that will break existing functionality. By creating a toggle around bugged behavior, you can make sure that the fix doesn’t accidentally worsen the original problem. This is especially important for systems that rely on automated testing, such as CI/CD.
One downside to using toggles is that they can cause additional overhead in a system. For example, if your toggles require a database call each time they are flipped, this can cause performance problems. It is best to use only a small number of toggles at a time, and to clean up your toggles quickly so that you don’t have thousands or millions of database calls sitting idle in production for a rarely changing configuration value.
Toggles are a great way to support agile development processes by allowing developers to use them in conjunction with features they are still working on. Traditionally, those features would be written on separate code branches and then undergo a lengthy testing and QA process before they could be added back to trunk. By leveraging toggles, teams can deliver new functionality to their customers even while they are still working on the feature in question.
