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Comment by billsimpson | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit off topic, but whenever I'm tempted to add React to a page or incorporate it into my single page app, I keep asking: is it worth roughly doubling the size of my javascript payload (130 kB React + 96 kB jQuery for AJAX + X kB business logic)?

I keep backing off, and sticking with jQuery/Backbone. One solution would be using a lightweight AJAX library in place of jQuery, but I haven't found one that is widely used, well maintained, and recommended. Can anyone recommend one?

Or in 2015 should an extra 130 kB be considered a non-issue?

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I've used github/fetch [1] which is a polyfill for the upcoming fetch standard [2]. If you ever want to go beyond this its one of state sources in marty.js [3]

[1] https://github.com/github/fetch [2] https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/ [3] http://martyjs.org/guides/state-sources/http.html

I'm a fan of [superagent] for AJAX. The React lib is big, but its declarative nature has lead to fewer and easier-to-diagnose bugs for us, which is ultimately a win for the end user. I've been using it exclusively on new projects for months now and I'm a Backbone.js core contributor ;)

superagent: https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent

I've been toying with mercury, which is similar to React/flux, and had the same dilemma as the parent. It seems a bit strange to use a really light weight library like mercury and then throw jQuery into the mix.

I also checked out superagent and it seems to have a good amount of dependencies. I was thinking of simply wrapping XMLHttpRequest with the promise lib of my choice.

This link seems relevant... http://youmightnotneedjquery.com

Have you tried Zepto[1]? It's ~9kb gzipped, and is compatible with a lot of jQuery's API. I've found that for a lot of the stuff I used jQuery for, it's mostly a drop-in replacement.

[1]: http://zeptojs.com/

If you use a CDN (or use the public CDNs that many of these libraries have) it's not 130 kb, it's a network request + 304

Yes. The issue for me has been that I bundle my libraries with my app using, for instance, Browserify. So whenever I update the app (which is fairly often), the entire bundle needs to be redownloaded by all clients. I guess the obvious solution is to unbundle the larger libraries that don't get updated frequently.

That is absolutely the solution. Don't bundle jQuery and other big libraries into your application code. It can drastically improve performance.

In that case, must you create one or more separate bundles to contain your vendor libraries? I suppose there's no way to directly integrate a jQuery library hosted on a public CDN.

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