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Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

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11–20 of 91 posts

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#11

It seems like Backbone is dominant, but after a couple months of using AngularJS on an everyday basis I'm ready to switch and never look back. Hands-down best framework I've ever worked with. The pleasure I get from it reminds me of the early days of Rails, when the leap in productivity was palpable.

I totally agree. One of the things that made me give it a try was the community support.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#12
JS frameworks are absolute cancer. They do nothing but kill page load times and degrade user experience: since when is it a good idea to recompile the whole entire standard library each time a program is run? They're also completely redundant in the modern browser, since standard compliance has gotten much better and more features have been added to HTML/JS/CSS. It's just yet another api that developers have to learn to code against, despite not offering any additional features.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#15
post #10

Another framework i barely hear about and surprised me a bit recently is sencha/ExtJS. They're growing a lot in the enterprise sector, but they managed to keep pretty up-to-date relative to web/open sources projects such as angular.Eg they added two-way data binding in their latest version in a not-to-ugly way. Anyone here got a real try on sencha (the full package, including sencha architect) recently ?

Don't bother. It is many times larger and slower than any of the frameworks listed. Their code is also broken in "interesting" ways and there are lots of undocumented and semi-documented gotchas.

It got enterprise traction because they were early to the game and promised MVC. They were pretty good for a while, but the other frameworks have passed them by.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#18
If you're just getting started with frameworks, I'd recommend Backbone. You can learn it in half the time it takes to understand Angular and it'll be a good introduction to MV*. This is probably why its more popular than Angular - its easier and its good enough. Angular has a lot of "magic" which can be intimidating and frustrating. Also writing JS logic in html just feels icky when separation was the manifesto for so many years.

That being said, there's many times where I work with Backbone and I feel like its missing pieces it should have. I don't have too much experience with Angular but it seems to be a much more complete choice.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#20

It seems like Backbone is dominant, but after a couple months of using AngularJS on an everyday basis I'm ready to switch and never look back. Hands-down best framework I've ever worked with. The pleasure I get from it reminds me of the early days of Rails, when the leap in productivity was palpable.

While Backbone's strength is its lack of assumptions and 'freeness', angular forces developers to strictly follow their constructs. Marionette [0] is an extension of backbone that also forces developers to follow constructs that lead to scalable, modular web apps. Marionette makes backbone feel like a tool to make prototypes.

0: http://marionettejs.com/

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