Rails remote links without jQuery and UJS and alternatives

Question

I am trying to optimize an application written in Rails, which is pretty much dependent on links and forms of "remote" (AJAX triggers). The thing is, pretty much everything we need for jQuery, so that seems like overuse. I was wondering if there is an easier approach to this, perhaps replacing / rewriting UJS to use some lighter javascript library (or none at all), and still make it work properly.

Answer 1

Since rails 3.0 ActionView helpers do not generate intrusive inline javascript. All you need to know to make an ajax request is contained in the generated DOM. So feel free to create a ujs driver for your preferred javascript library.

However, I personally did not. JQuery is not such a big deal. And given the fact that you can associate it with your page with some CDN and the likelihood that jquery has been pre-cached in a user browser is very high, the benefits of getting rid of JQuery will be overloaded with the amount of time you will spend developing / debugging / supporting your custom driver