Show HN: Umbrella JS, a 2kb jquery alternative

[franciscop]

http://umbrellajs.com/

[franciscop]

OP here, I created this for fun then it started growing and now I released it in case anyone want to play with it, I hope you like it. It's not a clone of jquery so it's not exactly like Zepto.js.

I specially love the build system I made with grunt, so each new function is just a folder in /src/plugins and it includes the "documentation.md" and "test.js" automagically.

PS, yes, it has bugs and it's probably not production-ready. However I would love as much feedback as possible. Of course ask me anything you want (:

[andreasklinger → franciscop]

unsure if relevant to you - but you might be able to show the documentation.md in the github directory view worstcase by renaming it to readme.md

[franciscop → andreasklinger]

Hey thanks for the tip, I preferred to show a "Getting Started" and general information instead of the library documentation itself in the readme, I think it made more sense.

[jhardy54 → franciscop]

GitHub actually shows a README file for each directory (if one exists), so the recommendation was to change /src/plugins/x/documentation.md to /src/plugins/x/README.md so that you could see the documentation on this page: https://github.com/umbrellajs/umbrella/tree/master/src/plugi...

[franciscop → jhardy54]

wow this is great! Thanks for the tip, I'll do it for sure

[mc_hammer → franciscop]

cool. gj.

nice website btw

[johnhenry]

I like it! Since it's a jQuery alternative, I wonder if you've considered having the global name default to "$" rather than "u"?

[franciscop → johnhenry]

It was somewhere in the documentation but I took that off deliberately since it's not really 100% compatible, so it'd just confuse people long-term.

> Edit: HN killed all the fun, I am refering to this character: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2602/index.htm

Funny enough, the name actually comes from the fact that unicode characters are accepted. First it was just a wrapper for document.querySelector(), and looking for a single character for the name I found out that this could be used:

    [umbrellachar]('.demo')

Of course in the end I decided against it, but for some time the official name of the library/function was just that character.

[zyxley → johnhenry]

Now I'm wondering how long until we start seeing frameworks use Unicode like 𐅭 or 𒌔.

[huskyr]

Nice. There seems to be a resurgence of jQuery alternatives, see also Lea Verou's Bliss: http://blissfuljs.com/

[franciscop → huskyr]

I didn't know of that, I'll surely try to contribute, thanks! (:

[pram]

wow your page uses an incredible amount of resources lol

http://i.imgur.com/I9zeKxm.png

[HCIdivision17 → pram]

I've got 165,372K, which is still a bit high, but not that high. The Economist tab is at 97,144K, Outlook is 84,340, and HN is 28,016K.

I think part of it is from the GPU: my GPU memory was marginally smaller than Umbrella's tab's usage once I turn to it (and slowly went down to 95,000k when I left). So maybe it's the little droplets or something.

[franciscop → pram]

I don't know why, I know that the rain/cloud animation is really CPU-intensive so it might be cached? Do you mind testing the same for /documentation where there's no animation, please?

[HCIdivision17 → franciscop]

I got about 20,000K for that page. The animated page does seem to climb a bit, but now that I've reloaded the page, it doesn't seem to be that high, sticking around 21,000K. So... maybe it just wasn't releasing all the memory as fast or something in Chrome?

[tuananh → pram]

almost 600MB of memory on mine !!!

[GordonS]

Note that it's 2kb when gzipped - but that is still a fraction of the size of jQuery when gzipped.

[franciscop → GordonS]

Sure, but what developer slightly concerned about website weight doesn't gzip them? (:

[coppolaemilio]

What is the current browser support?

[franciscop → coppolaemilio]

I test it regularly in IE11, Firefox and Chrome (last two in desktop and mobile). It might work in older IE versions, but it's not a goal since IE10 share is 0.85%, IE9 is 0.88% and IE8 is 1.15%, all of them decreasing month by month [1].

However it supports mobile much better since it'll load super-fast (:

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet-browser_ver...