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Comment by krebby | Hacker News Reader

Backbone is a fundamentally different paradigm from React, so as you point out it won't always make sense to borrow ideas from React or other one-way frameworks.* I find its usefulness waning these days for big projects, but it's absolutely my go-to for most small apps (I do a lot of client work). It's just easier to work with and less boilerplate when you don't need the strictness that React enforces / encourages.

As others have pointed out, having a stable API is a wonderful thing for a vast majority of projects. Backbone is stable because its ideas are battle-tested and the concepts are all there. People are seeing less usefulness for Marionette / Chaplin / Aurora, and I don't think that's all that bad.

* Disclosure: I'm a core contributor to Backbone.

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> It's just easier to work with and less boilerplate when you don't need the strictness that React enforces / encourages.

domvm [1] and Mithril [2] promote the same ideas as Backbone, as far as flexibility but with vdom underneath and are far faster than React. domvm is about 2x Mithril performance and both libs are < 20k min. Mithril is more stable and has a much larger userbase, while domvm 1.0 is targeted for 4/1. If anyone is feeling adventurous, feedback and contributions are welcome!

* Disclosure: I'm the author of domvm.

[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm

[2] http://mithril.js.org/

I love that Mithril has been surfacing as a framework to watch now that the hype cycle around angular/react is bubbling down. It struck me as one to watch years ago, and were it not for the popularity of the aforementioned the case for it could have been quite convincing. I will definitely be looking for opportunities to trial it.

I have been evaluating it vs react for some UI's I am working on and have come away very impressed. Coupled with underscore or lodash and you get most of the niceties of es6+react with a much smaller size.

I still haven't made my mind up on react but really like redux and i would like to try redux out with domvm

According to Inferno's benchmarks section[1] that lists Mithril, Mithril is actually slower than React when it comes to DBMonster and is slower than all others listed. As an aside, domvm seems to be exceptional in its performance and size. Yes, others are faster, but the library is much smaller. The flexibility of it is also pretty awesome and holds a place in my heart after making my own mini framework years ago.

[1]https://github.com/trueadm/inferno#benchmarks

A small perf % is given up by domvm for improved ergonomics and compositional freedom. This was a premeditated choice for the architecture.

More details if you're interested: https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm/issues/30#issuecomment-193...

FWIW, I definitely agree that this is mostly a non-event for small apps. I work on a large, actively developed web application, where the lack of strong actively maintained supporting libraries for things like form validation, rich tables, and other use cases is painful, especially since there were great projects for those use cases that are no longer actively maintained.

Instead of using Backgrid and backbone-validation or alternatives, we've been left creating an in house "tables" approach, and maintaining our own fork of backbone-validation. Neither of those things scale well.

The approach of a small core library with other libraries filling gaps as needed only works when there are good libraries that work well with the small core library :/ For some things its easy to take a "VanillaJS" library and make it work, but for others it really helps to have tight library integration.

>maintaining our own fork of backbone-validation

Is there any reason your changes can't be upstreamed?

What's a "VanillaJS library"?

Is that the same sort of concept as a "birthday suit"? ( I.e. none at all)

Backbone is not maintained at all, and no, cosmetic commits aren't maintenance. Backbone led to messes bigger than jQuery messes, it's full of useless stuff and frankly should be retired and deprecated. What's the point of backbone model? it's useless so one has to use relational. What's the point of the router? it's too basic so people have to use a better one, the view? the view never did anything relevant, Backbone is like an unfinished framework the only reason it became popular is because it came at a time when rubyists were influential. That time is over. People shouldn't use Backbone, AT ALL.

> As others have pointed out, having a stable API is a wonderful thing for a vast majority of projects

Well obviously it didn't change the sad state of backbone ecosystem. Having good API to build things upon is more important than the stability of an API. Backbone is dying because the core libs aren't good enough in 2016.

Sounds like you brought into the useless mess and now have to maintain a system written in it, hence the anger and tears.

Eventually the maintenance developer realises that anger and tears aren't useful, and funnels that into documentation, cleanup and a hell of a lot of printf-debugging.

...and whiskey.

FWIW, it's possible to create messes in Backbone, JQuery, D3, React and plain javascript, if you try hard enough.

It must be really rewarding to be the author of an open-source project when you read feedback like this...

Backbone is "dying", if you will, because an awful lot has changed in the last five years, not because it was necessarily fundamentally bad - though, of course, it had its limitations.

Should we all hold our tongues lest any notional FOSS author be offended?

Too many chefs throw their hat into the ring as it is (especially in JS framework land), a higher bar isn't necessarily bad.

Well, I think: 1) "notional" is an odd choice of word since @jashkenas has over 20K karma on here; and 2) it's fine to offer reasoned criticism, but the sort of denigration I was responding to ("messes", "useless", odd comments about Rubyists) really is unnecessary.

1) I'm not sure what you mean, your comment was generalised, implying it has a wider scope than this one author. I'm also not sure what karma has to do with anything..

2) If the rubyist comment is 'odd' to you, how are you sure that it's denigrating? as for 'messes' and 'useless', you've divorced them from context:

> Backbone led to messes bigger than jQuery messes, it's full of useless stuff

> What's the point of backbone model? it's useless so one has to use relational.

Your concern is tone-policing?

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