A new open source JavaScript library claims to offer 90 per cent of the popular jQuery library's functionality at only 13 per cent of the size. jQuip – JQuery-in-parts – is small enough that it can be included as source to avoid external references in web pages, according to the developers. It offers the $() selector syntax and methods including each , attr , bind , unbind , append , prepend , before , after and many more. It also supports a wide range of events and static methods. Plugins allow jQuip to expand its capability to detect documentReady and perform CSS manipulation and Ajax calls. Any call not implemented currently throws a "not implemented" exception. The animation methods hide , show , fadeIn and fadeOut work, but do not animate.

The developers say, though, that their primary goal with jQuip is to "kickstart" the jQuery developers into a modular reorganisation of the codebase saying "we've proved the most useful parts of jQuery is a fraction of its code-base". The minified and gzipped jquip.js is only 4.28 KB and just minified,12.6 KB. A page on Servicestack.net allows users to select the plugins and create a custom version. Even with all the plugins in place, jQuip comes out at only 19.8 KB of minified code. jQuip is available under the MIT licence and can be downloaded from the project's github repository.

(djwm)