Very excited to play with this. I like Backbone but I always feel like I'm fighting .sync if it's not mapped 1:1 with a rest API. Plus npm + browserify ftw!
Introducing Ampersand.js
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#32Great to see the efforts on keeping web applications simple. Coming from a Ruby-on-Rails background, I discovered similar principles while writing the book "Full Stack JavaScript appliactions with BackboneJS" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030799.do
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#33> We No offense but I completely disagree. I don't know what problems does backbone solve. > But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land. We wanted something similar in style and philosophy, but that fully embraced tiny modules, npm, and browserify. > So we made Ampersand.js, a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny, and loosely coupled modules for building J…
CommonJS is far superior to AMD. This is an attempt to rewrite parts of backbone to make it better, one of the main parts of that is making it CommonJS compatible. The other part is simplifying the getters and setters and the way changing properties fires events.
I think that is debatable. CommonJS is certainly simpler, however it won't work for browser-based javascript unless you wrap it with appropriate tooling. In that respect it's not just inferior to AMD, but it isn't even a viable solution.
Not that I'm against CommonJS. It just requires additional tooling to be "superior" so I don't think you should make such a blanket statement.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
CommonJS is far superior to AMD. This is an attempt to rewrite parts of backbone to make it better, one of the main parts of that is making it CommonJS compatible. The other part is simplifying the getters and setters and the way changing properties fires events.
I think that is debatable. CommonJS is certainly simpler, however it won't work for browser-based javascript unless you wrap it with appropriate tooling. In that respect it's not just inferior to AMD, but it isn't even a viable solution. Not that I'm against CommonJS. It just requires additional tooling to be "superior" so I don't think you should make such a blanket statement.
Browserify? Same wrapping as RequireJS would implement I believe, obviously not the 'same' but same level of performance hit and browser based tooling.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#35Isn't Backbone.js already 6.5kb, Packed and gzipped? Why is the stress put on making it smaller/modular? I don't think that is the problem at all. The problem is one that frameworks like Ember.js are trying to solve... reuseable, convention-based and opinionated. This is what Rails got right and something I think that client-side frameworks lack. Rails' success, for the most part, is due to its really strong opinions and conventions. These client-side "frameworks" are often brought in with the byline that its intent is to be TINY. To me, that's not what these ambitious JS frameworks should be bullet-pointing first.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#36> We No offense but I completely disagree. I don't know what problems does backbone solve. > But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land. We wanted something similar in style and philosophy, but that fully embraced tiny modules, npm, and browserify. > So we made Ampersand.js, a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny, and loosely coupled modules for building J…
Parent should not have been downvoted and it irritates me that it was
1. hasenhj is correct, Backbone has been superseded for "advanced" webapps for at least two years and should not be used for new webapp development
2. I had the same confusion and question about what exactly ampersand is and what "advanced app" problems it sovles
emotional edit: I've used Backbone, Knockout and React in "advanced" (enterprise-scale) production apps, and studied TodoMVC and skimmed the book for Angular and Ember. My original decision to use backbone & knockout in enterprise scale app almost wrecked my first greenfield project, we spent multiple months ripping out Backbone based code. In 2014, Backbone.Model and Backbone.View are very naive ways to approach frontend problems and it is not obvious why until you've been using them a few months. There is an entire ecosystem of blog posts on HN of people attempting to explain why. Any and all of the above dependencies are better than Backbone/Knockout for new webapp development. They of course have the advantage of learning from Backbone, Knockout, YUI, Sencha etc, so it is no surprise that they tackle the hard problems that backbone makes no attempt to solve.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, we just wanted to give the background to the project and why in the post, rather than focussing too heavily on code. Your landing page should contain what your users want to see, not what you want to put there. You might be excited about the motivation behind your project but nobody cares, really. I clicked on the link and I spent ten minutes reading a wall of text hoping to find good reasons why I should sw…
A little harsh, don't you think? The link is to a blog post - not a landing page - and it seems to me it can contain whatever the author wanted it to. The post wasn't submitted here by anyone from &yet, but by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone which is partly the basis for ampersand). The actual landing page is http://ampersandjs.com (linked in the first sentence of the blog post) and has plenty of technical c…
Yes, you're right, I apologize for being a bit harsh.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#38There was a link earlier on HN about declarative programming. In my opinion that's the best solution to the front-end dev issue.No amount of Backbone based framework ,as good as they are(and I use some) really solve the "how do I build a complex interactive view" problem on the client. Setting intents and expectations and letting the framework drive the view life cycle solves many issues.AngularJS and React success a…
Marionette takes care of this quite well for very complex views, results in much cleaner markup than angular etc, and is built on backbone. Give it a shot.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#39> We No offense but I completely disagree. I don't know what problems does backbone solve. > But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land. We wanted something similar in style and philosophy, but that fully embraced tiny modules, npm, and browserify. > So we made Ampersand.js, a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny, and loosely coupled modules for building J…
Parent should not have been downvoted and it irritates me that it was 1. hasenhj is correct, Backbone has been superseded for "advanced" webapps for at least two years and should not be used for new webapp development 2. I had the same confusion and question about what exactly ampersand is and what "advanced app" problems it sovles emotional edit: I've used Backbone, Knockout and React in "advanced" (enterprise-scale…
Complete shenanigans. Backbone is still heavily used in production for tons of "advanced" web apps. You can't just make statements like this because you decided you like angular or something better.
Re: Introducing Ampersand.js
#40Was just reading this today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169299
That would be an insightful and relevant comment, if it weren't for the strange digression into a pornography metaphor.
I appreciate that the author distilled his thoughts about software down into porno terms we can all relate to.