Brent Simmons isn’t totally convinced about the new crop of JavaScript frameworks:
"Part of me thinks those frameworks are overkill (even jQuery), and that writing regular-old JavaScript to do what you want is not that onerous a thing, and will make for leaner, better code."
This was how I felt when I built Watermark. It uses jQuery and Bootstrap, but otherwise it’s pretty old-fashioned JavaScript. Even the parts that are Ajax just fetch and insert HTML that has been rendered by the server. There’s not much to do in the client.
For my latest project I’m using Ember.js. I want this app to be very fast, and I think putting more work on the web browser is the way to do it. I only know the basics of the framework so far, but already I like it. It feels lightweight to use, even if the actual JavaScript include is fairly large.
And 100k is really not that big of a deal anymore. You don’t want bloat for no reason. But look at a popular site like twitter.com and you’ll see several JavaScript files between 200k and 500k each. They get cached and no one complains about performance.
