Coding the Angular Tutorial App in Backbone

Angular is easier for me to read and understand then the equivalent Backbone code right from the start

The Angular Tutorial App is an excellent demonstration of Angular's off-the-shelf features. In fact, it's designed precisely to demonstrate Angular's strengths. Angular reduces boilerplate but it's a heavier, more opinionated framework. The price you typically pay for less boilerplate is higher complexity when you need to alter the framework to fit your needs.

This is an extremely common (neccesary?) tradeoff. Think Rails vs. Sinatra or Django vs. Flask. Django gives you a great off-the-shelf backend that's perfectly suitable for most jobs. But I don't want to go under the hood to bend Django to fit an atypical project, and for those I'll use a minimal framework like Flask.

My issue with Angular is that I really want to avoid looking under the hood because the complexity is so high. Backbone is just a small, modular, well-documented library that invites you to look under the hood. If Angular doesn't fit my project, I'm happy to have Backbone in my toolkit, and I know the additional boilerplate up front will pay off down the road. Yes, it'll force me to think more up front about how to organize and architect my app, and that's not a bad thing.

> I mean I don't want to spend time learning a framework that might be dead 2 years from now (remember prototype ?)

2 years ago I jumped ship from KnockoutJS to AngularJS. Backbone was also quite hyped out around the same time. All three of them are still around and frankly speaking it wouldn't have been a problem for me if the one I picked died by now. The skills I learned in Knockout helped me quickly learn Angular.

Think of it this way, learning on its own, regardless of what you're learning is valuable. My suggesstion, take a day and examine whatever frameworks you've heard of and pick one and learn it.

The framework battle is really between Backbone, Angular, and Ember. No one else I can think of off hand has the marketshare that those 3 do..

And each has their own strengths and unique opinions. My preference is Ember, but it's just that, a preference.

Comparing Backbone and Angular is like comparing apples and dinner.

Backbone is a library. You can use it or ignore it, combine it with other stuff, you call Backbone code and use its objects, and it does some limited but well-defined stuff. It's easy to combine with other libraries, and you don't have to use Backbone's feature everywhere if you don't want to.

Angular, on the other hand, is a framework. It shapes everything you do. It bootstraps your application for you, and calls your code when it needs your input. It imposes a totally different way of working and thinking on you. What it does for you is far bigger than what Backbone does for you. It doesn't play nice with libraries that haven't been written for use with Angular.

Really, the difference is like writing a basic Java program where you write the main() and you call some libraries; and using a webframework that handles tons of stuff for you and you just write the controllers, services and views.