How much library code do you really need — 50K? 100K? 150K? More? How much of that do you really use?
Sure, we all love our favorite monolithic frameworks, and sometimes we even use them fully. But how often do we reach for the ride-on John Deere tractor with air conditioning and six-speaker sound system, when a judiciously applied pocketknife would do the trick better, faster, slicker?
Micro-frameworks are definitely the pocketknives of the JavaScript library world: short, sweet, to the point. And at 5k and under, micro-frameworks are very very portable. A micro-framework does one thing and one thing only — and does it well. No cruft, no featuritis, no feature creep, no excess anywhere.
Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you.
Want to add your own? Fork this site on GitHub, add your framework to data.js and submit a pull request. When adding your source URL, please use an un-minified file with a name that's unlikely to change (no version numbers).
- Must not have dependencies (1)
- Must do something useful, and must not be just a demo
- Must be MIT/BSD-license or similiar
- Templating engines and loaders will only be added if they're outstanding and exceptional.
- Add to "data.js"
- Has to be <5k, minified and gzipped (2)
- Needs a "url" that points to readme/docs & code-download (ideally GitHub)
- Needs a "source" attribute that points at a single-file, ready-to-use download of the library/framework (unminified) (3)
- Prefer hand-coded/hand-optimized JavaScript over generated/cross-compiled code.
- Running "make" should work and not return an error. To run make, you'll need node/npm installed.
(1) It's ok to target a specific platform, like node.js, or WebKit.
(2) To check the minified and compressed size of your library from the command line, either use ./build -v (see below) or run:
$ uglifyjs yourlib.js | gzip -9f | wc -c
(3) If your source very small, you can simply included the whole thing in the source attribute as a string.
If your source is split across multiple files, you can use an array of URLs (it's preferrable to just have
a single source). If your source is released in a ZIP file you can point to the ZIP's URL and append a
!/zip/entry.js to the end so the compiler knows where to look (it's still preferrable to just have a
single source URL!)
make deps will run npm install --dev to install the dependencies of the data compiler.
make compile will run the compiler. The compiler reads data.js and checks the source of
each entry. It will calculate the raw, minified and gzipped sizes of the entries.
You will see warnings where entries need to be checked and errors where entries will be excluded.
If you wish to see details of all entries, you can run the ./build -v command.
Please note that Microjs.com is a curated site and that we reserve the right to refuse any listing for any reason.
The microjs.com code/website is released under a MIT License.