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Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

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Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#31

Post by MattRogish »

heyitsnick wrote: post #23

I wanted to use Ember, and I started going down that road, but I just didn't click with it. I didn't progress past the tutorial! I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples.* I switched to Backbone and got going right away, in half a day of reading the docs and watching a c…

We use Ember + Rails at work and if we didn't start with an Ember expert contractor we'd have been sunk. Ember is definitely a winding maze of stuff and until there's a "Agile Web Development with Ember 1.0" book, it's still very difficult to just jump in from scratch.

Still, once we've learned Ember we're very happy with it. Backbone is just too small to start any medium/large app, and Ember has a decent community behind it and lots of integrations with Rails.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#32

Post by lefnire »

dustingetz wrote: post #19
lefnire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it often is a simple comparison. Meteor & Derby, for example, are the exact same use-case - and I think in the end, one will survive the battle and the other lose steam. People say Backbone & Angular are different use-cases, but I find so many people "graduating" Backbone and wishing they'd chosen a more robust framework. They say they want to start minimal, so they pick Backbone. You can be minimal with Angu…

let me put it this way - right now, this month, im evaluating stacks for an enterprise-y amazon-y feeling thing. Say $XX million dollar budget, ~100k LOC with ~10 engineers (mostly cranky and old) for 7 months. i'm not sure if you're freelancing an app as a sole developer, or if you're an early stage startup, or if you work on amazon.com store. and where your project is, in this spectrum, is incredibly relevant conte…

That's a very good point.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#33

Post by lefnire »

cookingrobot wrote: post #28

Derby looks interesting, but their sample apps (chat and todo) crash and hang safari on my iPhone. Are folks sure its acceptable for mobile focused web apps? Is this a known problem or something unique to me?

That's that public-face failure bit I pointed out in my post. My own Derby app https://habitrpg.com is smooth-sailing, but people's first impression Derby's home-page examples. For a lot of people, the buck stops there - unbeknownst to them, it's quite stable at HEAD

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#34

Post by hnwh »

johnnymonster wrote: post #21
jtchang wrote: post #14

Try knockout. I wrote a quick intro to it a few days ago: http://returnbooleantrue.blogspot.com/2012/12/architecting-k... I personally don't like backbone that much. I don't know why so many people love the damn thing. It is hard to understand and not even that great.

I personally use knockout all the time. Can't stand backbone or angular after using knockout.

Backbone I understand, but why not angular? It seems quite similar to knockout to me? Whats your backend platform?

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#35

Post by thibaut_barrere »

johnnymonster wrote: post #21
jtchang wrote: post #14

Try knockout. I wrote a quick intro to it a few days ago: http://returnbooleantrue.blogspot.com/2012/12/architecting-k... I personally don't like backbone that much. I don't know why so many people love the damn thing. It is hard to understand and not even that great.

I personally use knockout all the time. Can't stand backbone or angular after using knockout.

I have the same question as @hnwh: I'm using Knockout and really, really like it (more suited to my way of working than say Backbone), but considered that Angular could be a more advanced/featureful Knockout.

Can you elaborate a bit? Thanks!

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#36

Post by davidw »

I have a rant coming about these things too.

* I started out with Backbone. It seems ok as far as it goes, but a bit annoying in that there's enough "magic" and stuff going on that I don't quite understand it completely, but without enough magic to really make things simple and easy.

* Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh: http://www.grobmeier.de/angular-js-binding-to-jquery-ui-date... - how many lines of code just to make it a date picker? I couldn't have written that code myself without several more days of banging my head. Wonder what'd happen if I really try and do something it doesn't agree with... So out the window with that for the time being.

Also: a lot of these tools have tutorials that don't really walk me through all of what I want to do, which initially involves a fairly straightforward "CRUD" type of application. I want to see how the framework deals with both 'make me a new one' and 'edit an existing one' forms, for instance. I found that very irritating about the Angular tutorial, which is otherwise very nicely put together.

Now I'm testing out jquery-pjax, and... so far I'm happier. It behaves more like a web application that I'm used to, sending around HTML, and staying out of my way. And, seeing as how all of these things require that the server do its job in any case, it has more of a "don't repeat yourself" feel to it: click on the button, and the server gives us some new data, without repeating the whole MVC cycle on both the client and server. I got the idea from this post: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#37

Post by hellopat »

I'm working on an app which uses Ember 1.0.0pre-2. Over the past few weeks I've been lazy / busy doing other things so the project was set aside for a bit. I came back to it yesterday, opened the guide page (http://emberjs.com/guides/) and noticed it had been updated. I was excited and immediately checked the Router section. The guide reflects a brand new router API, which from what I've read makes it much easier to control the state of your application.

The problem with Ember right now is the documentation doesn't align with the most recent public version, which will confuse the heck out of newcomers and frustrate people who are still learning Ember. You can however, check out master to get the new router implementation.

I'm personally making the jump to the bleeding edge for two reasons: 1. The old router API is very hard to grasp. A lot of unknowns as far as where domain code fits when building your application using the router. 2. I don't want to be stuck struggling to find documentation for an already difficult API to work with.

With all that said, Ember is worth taking a look at as far as an 'improved' MV* experience, but you have to be careful as it is in a state of flux.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#38

Post by eterpstra »

joshontheweb wrote: post #22

Ok, you like angular. I don't. It has too much magic and forces you to pollute your html with ng attributes. Blanket statements about frameworks like this grow old. So much of the decision comes down to individual preference and the needs of the project. No need to rant about it. I can't really speak on derby vs meteor but I imagine it's the same.

I don't quite understand the 'polluting the html' argument. How is this worse than using a templating package like Moustache? Plus, it's Angular's mission to extend html with the framework. Says so right on the homepage.

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#39

Post by SoapSeller »

jtchang wrote: post #14

Try knockout. I wrote a quick intro to it a few days ago: http://returnbooleantrue.blogspot.com/2012/12/architecting-k... I personally don't like backbone that much. I don't know why so many people love the damn thing. It is hard to understand and not even that great.

Yeah, knockout is great. And it's relatively(to angular) easy to understand what's going on.

Also, in my tests for an app(PhoneGap) I did recently, it seems much faster than angular(rendering seems to take half the time)

Re: Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby

#40

Post by coenhyde »

Marionette (a framework built on backbone) offers a nice solution. It still keeps things pretty light but does a lot of the groundwork you would normally have to do with backbone for you. Eg cleaning up event bindings, provides a region/view manager and an application wide event bus.
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