Bringing AJAX Down to Size

Sometimes the price you pay for getting a rich user interface in an AJAX-based web app is a hefty file size on web pages that include large JavaScript libraries. Keeping page sizes to a minimum is one of the metrics that Andrew Turner and Chao Wang considered when deciding which AJAX library to use for a new web project. In their article, AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits, they describe the selection process that led them to choose the Yahoo! User Interface Library. The YUI's balance of functionality and small file size was one of the deciding factors.

Although the YUI won out over the Prototype library for this project, there is another super small library that can work with the stripped-down version of Prototype and provides some nice transition effects: the moo.fx effects library is just 3 KB and works with Prototype or the MooTools Framework.

Posted by John Dorsey at 11:35 PM  Permalink