Micro frameworks have always existed as small scripts (say, less than 5kb of code) for handling very specific tasks, from templating to inheritance to animation. With the common JavaScript frameworks increasing in size with every release, people have begun to question whether all that code is necessary for your average site. Perhaps it’s possible to get away with a few small scripts that handle the majority of use cases.

Recently, a couple of members of the Twitter team released Ender.js, a framework comprised of many smaller scripts that provides most of the functionality of jQuery at a third of the size. However, the really interesting part of the project is that its modular design allows any of the components to be swapped out allowing you to build a highly personalised toolkit.

For this Async, we’ll take a look at a few of these micro frameworks and talk about the pros and cons of using them in your sites. We hope you’ll bring along your own frameworks that you’ve written, been using or even just earmarked out of curiosity. The format aims be very loose: we’ll bring up the code’s homepage or documentation, briefly outline what it can do before discussing its use cases and where you might like to use it.

Here’s a few to get you thinking:

• $script: JavaScript source code loader
• Event.js: Cross browser event handling.
• Mustache: Cross platform templating
• Emile: LightWeight animation

Some links for light reading

We thought it would be nice for posterity to add links to the frameworks we discussed on the night. If we've missed any please do let us know!

• Lettering JS: Great jQuery plugin for playing manipulating text.
• Head JS: Script loading, feature detection, HTML5 shim and more all rolled into one.
• Event JS: Cross browser DOM event library, supports keyboard shortcuts and hash change events.
• Emilie: Tiny animation utility.
• Firmin: Interesting CSS3 animation library.
• getscript: Super simple script loader.
• MicroEvent: Easily add publish/subscribe methods to your objects.
• Amplify JS: Pub/Sub, persistence and request toolkit. Wonderful website and documentation but it is in beta and currently dependant on jQuery

Also just a few days after the meet up Thomas Fuchs announced microjs.com; a directory of micro frame works. There’s some great projects on there, I heartily recommend perusing the listings.

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