alt Hacker NewsShow HN: µJS, a 5KB alternative to Htmx and Turbo with zero dependencies
I built µJS because I wanted AJAX navigation without the verbosity of HTMX or the overhead of Turbo.
It intercepts links and form submissions, fetches pages via AJAX, and swaps fragments of the DOM. Single <script> tag, one call to `mu.init()`. No build step, no dependencies.
Key features: patch mode (update multiple fragments in one request), SSE support, DOM morphing via idiomorph, View Transitions, prefetch on hover, polling, and full HTTP verb support on any element.
At ~5KB gzipped, it's smaller than HTMX (16KB) and Turbo (25KB), and works with any backend: PHP, Python, Go, Ruby, whatever.
Playground: https://mujs.org/playground
Comparison with HTMX and Turbo: https://mujs.org/comparison
About the project creation, why and when: https://mujs.org/about
GitHub: https://github.com/Digicreon/muJS
Happy to discuss the project.
Comments
Reminds me a little of htmz
htmz is a minimalist HTML microframework for creating interactive and modular web user interfaces with the familiar simplicity of plain HTML.
heya amaury, great library!
i have added it to the htmx alternatives page:
There’s several other (well) known examples of the use of mujs.
There’s Artifex’s interpreter from muPDF. It’s also the basis of several JS related projects: https://mujs.com/
There’s also a lesser known interpreter: https://github.com/ccxvii/mujs
And IIRC, there was a CommonJS library of the same name.
I’d like to see a comparison with pjax as well: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax
It's about time browsers start supporting something like this natively. Fingers crossed.
I'll be checking this out. Any chance you (or anyone) has had a run with this lib + web components? I'd love to hear about it.
Looks useful! I skimmed through the docs and had a question.
Is there a mechanism for loading HTML partials that require additional style or script file? And possibly a way to trigger a JS action when loaded? For example, loading an image gallery.
Not to be confused with https://mujs.com/ I guess?
Does it automatically parse JSON responses from servers into objects? This is my one big gripe about htmx, even though the devs and other users keep telling me I shouldn't want that as a feature and that it "doesn't make sense".
Sorry if I need to use existing APIs I cannot change.
I like the idea. DOM morphing is nice.
I've done this previously with morphdom to AJAXify a purely server-driven backoffice system in a company.
I would love something even smaller. No `mu-` attributes (just rely on `id`, `href`, `rel`, `rev` and standard HTML semantics).
There's a nice `resource` attribute in RDFa which makes a lot of sense for these kinds of things: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/#h-resource
Overall, I think old 2015-era microdata like RDFa and this approach would work very well. Instead of reinventing attributes, using a standard.
Nice project, always interesting to see HTMX-inspired frameworks.
If you want something even more minimalistic, I did Swap.js: 100 lines of code, handles AJAX navigation, browser history, custom listeners when parts of DOM are swapped, etc.
https://github.com/josephernest/Swap.js
Using it for a few production products and it works quite well!