I like jQuery, but sometimes I miss utility functions from Prototype.js. But with Underscore, this is over! You can use invoke, first, last, compact… and it’s only 2kb packed and gzipped.

Example

I find it very useful when I get JSON with jQuery. Let’s take a Twitter example:

To get the results with jQuery you will be very limited: $.each, $.map and that’s pretty much all. With Underscore it’s easy to build an array of tweets from the results:

In addition, if you’re a Ruby developer you’re addicted to first and last on arrays:

And you have an OOP style too:

There’s a lot of functions (not just for arrays), so take a look at the documentation which is great!

A final library

Now I have my utility functions, I want to use classes. I found a little Javascript lib from June to do that in a way I like. It’s very small and there’s just what I need: modules, classes, methods and mixins.

I’m in a more familiar world here. There’s JS.Class to do that too but I don’t need all the core functions.

Conclusion

Now I have a fast and small way to write my Javascript and it’s perfect (for now anyway).