XUI
frameworks
mobile
I was recently reviewing mobile web JavaScript frameworks when I came across XUI, by Brian LeRoux and the other PhoneGap authors. XUI is a micro-framework — it’s designed to be small, portable and concise.
XUI provides the following features:
- Element lookup through selectors
- Events, with support for touch screens
- DOM manipulation
- Animation through tweening
- XmlHttpRequest
The API is available through the global x$. Usage looks like this:
x$('li','.selected', '#some_id'); // Returns elements for a selector or list, similar to $ in jQuery and $$ in Prototype
x$('#video').html('inner', '<strong>Rick Roll</strong>'); // Modifies the HTML of an element
x$('a.save').on('click', function(e) { alert('Saving...') }); // Events
x$('#box').tween([{ left:100px, backgroundColor:'green', duration:.2 }, { right:100px }]); // Tweening
You might be wondering why XUI is smaller and faster than frameworks like jQuery. Ultimately it’s because they’ve cut the cross-browser chaff that we need for cross-browser development. They’ve also tightly focused on mobile web development.
It’s smart of the PhoneGap developers to extract this framework, much like Sizzle was a good idea. In fact, there are enough useful features in it to do a lot without even using the rest of PhoneGap!