Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

Whenever someone asks me about learning and using AngularJS I link them to this helpful diagram:

http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-My-Experience-With-Angular...

I've been using AngularJS for more than three months now and feel like I finally reached a tipping point where the months of agony are starting to pay off. Before switching to AngularJS I used Backbone.js extensively and tried out Ember.js.

The biggest thing to realize with AngularJS, I think, is that your entire front-end "stack" needs to be re-evaluated. Having been using CoffeeScript for a long time, I actually ended up taking it out of all my environments so that it would be easier to debug and understand my JS code as it is "interpreted" by AngularJS. I also had to force myself to stop thinking in jQuery and learn to live with jqLite (which naturally pressures you to exercise restraint with by-hand DOM manipulation, angular.element, etc.,.). While it felt unnatural to me at first, writing directives became second nature after I understood how to properly use them and how powerful they really are. When evaluating JS libraries to include in my code, I now find myself asking whether they can be easily integrated in the "AngularJS" way (making D3.js work with AngularJS was great practice).

Secondly, we all need to face and accept that the current AngularJS documentation is crap and it doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon. In addition to that, I sometimes stumble upon a lot of poorly written (or outdated) AngularJS example code on blogs, videos and SO. I only began to understand what really goes on under the hood when I started stepped into AngularJS's function calls while debugging my code. I also found that much of the functionality is not yet documented or is documented poorly and lot of insights can be found in the code comments left by the Google folks.

Was it painful to learn and to use for a long time? Oh yes. Does it still sometimes cause me to tear my hair out? Absolutely. Do I think that it is worth it? Without a doubt.

If I want to build a rich js app, with no hash tag URLs (meaning - Google can crawl everything), would you still use Backbone/angular.

I'm an amateur when it comes to JavaScript, but we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get a map based application working in Backbone (which was crawlable)-plus the performance was not as good as ... well,let me say competitors not using Backbone.

Not sure about the methodology here. In addition to having my own startup using Ember.js, I'm constantly meeting with other startups building their business on it:

* Discourse

* Travis CI

* Practice Fusion

* Nitrous.io

* Embedly

* Balanced

* Customer.io

* Addepar

Not sure if you count other places like Square or Zendesk as startups, but they're using it too. We've also seen big companies like McGraw-Hill Education start building out their next generation technology using it.

You can find a longer list of users here:

http://emberjs.com/ember-users/

Of the two choices, I would definitely continue to use Ember.js. Backbone is disqualified due to obvious, reknowned scalability issues; most apps need a plethora of plugins and framework enhancers that jell dubiously and weigh your app down as much as a heavier framework like Angular or Ember, so why bother? Between Angular and Ember, I would take Ember's API over Angular's directive fanaticism any day.