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Comment by jjm | Hacker News Reader

They both provide pretty much the same features, but jQuery has had more time and exposure so It is 'probably' a tad more stable.

With regard to backbone and the like it really all depends on your ppl resources. If you want corp support you can forget about it. Sencha's ExtJs might be a better fit.

Also note that backbone and almost all the wonderful modules out there haven't even reached 1.0. It is perhaps this that makes Googles offering compelling as they use this internally and relies on a stable API/codebase.

For the record, I am a big backbone, coffeescript fan.

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Closure is used in basically every Google product. There's no comparison - in terms of pageviews, edge cases, and general real-world exposure, Closure is more widely used than probably every other JS library.

I actually think they fill very different niches. JQuery is for sites that are primarily HTML but require some additional interactivity layered on via progressive enhancement. Closure is meant for JavaScript apps, where the whole client is basically written in JavaScript. Closure provides a lot of services that JQuery doesn't - there's a very full-featured widget library, and a JS compiler to minify your code, and a whole module system with on-demand code loading that's critical when your app becomes large.

The flip side is that coding to Closure conventions is very verbose. It feels like Java, a lot of the time. If your app is going to have hundreds of thousands of lines and dozens of developers, this is the right move. If it's just you trying to bang out an interactive website in a couple weeks, JQuery will let you get the basics done in much less code.

Does Google considers verbose good?

That's not really a meaningful question - Google's a big company with thousands of engineers, and most of them would say there's a time to be verbose and a time to be concise, and knowing the difference is basically experience.

There is a strong belief - at Google and elsewhere - that any engineer should be able to read any other engineer's code. That means getting assumptions down in the code so there's nothing you have to keep in your head.

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