How bad is it to do Ajax without jQuery? [closed]

Question

I've come to the point where I need Ajax on my page, but it's just for one small part - to see if a username typed in is in the database. As explained here Ajax can be done with JavaScript alone. What are the pros/cons of doing it this way? I'm leaning towards this because I don't want a large library and think it's unnecessarily complicated when everything else is already JavaScript alone.

Answer 1

If you don't need to support older version of IE, like IE6, then it's quite simple, you don't need any factory function, just a plain:

var http = new XMLHttpRequest();

For all browsers. Plus, in recent browsers (I believe also in IE8), you can simplify more using onload events instead of onreadystate:

var http = new XMLHttpRequest();

http.open("GET", "somepage.html", true);
http.onload = function () {
    alert("Request complete: " + http.responseText);
}
http.send();

That is quite similar to the success handler of jQuery.

For further details, see: Using XMLHttpRequest

However, jQuery now has the ajax calls threat as promises, that makes some scenario (like waiting for multiple ajax calls to finish before run some code) much easier to develop.