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Comment by nciagra | Hacker News Reader

Sure, I'll break it down: batman.js is a JavaScript framework for rich JavaScript applications. It's designed to make development as fast and as painless as possible for developers and designers while giving them lots of power.

We designed everything around a number of primary goals such as convention over configuration, HTML-based views, and the principle of least surprise. This is something we're using at Shopify in our future projects, so it's meeting those goals while coming out of real work.

If you want more info, the features page (http://batmanjs.org/features.html) has a list of everything we're trying to do, and the examples page (http://batmanjs.org/examples.html) has a few usage examples. There's still only a couple, but I'm working as quickly as possible to build out the gallery.

And of course, let me know if there's anything else I can answer about the framework. I hope that helped clear it up a bit, though!

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"batman.js is a JavaScript framework for rich JavaScript applications. It's designed to make development as fast and as painless as possible for developers and designers while giving them lots of power."

That sounds like a pitch I would give a non-techie manager or client. Someone who's been around computers enough to know that javascript is the thingie that makes web pages do stuff.

Your target audience is developers, yes? We can take it. The first thing in your pitch should be how it helps, not "We'll save you lots of time, we promise. Trust us!"

Man, tough audience.

I didn't know about batman either and I got the same impression when landing on the page. It took me a few clicks to get a handle of what it was.

Can I suggest that in the website header you include some sort of one-line description, like 'the javascript web application framework', or similar and more creative?

I still don't really understand when I would consider using it. Would you use it to create some or all of Shopify?

Maybe this blurb from the documentation could find its way to the hoe page:

batman.js is a framework for building rich single-page browser applications. It is written in CoffeeScript and its API is developed with CoffeeScript in mind, but of course you can use plain old JavaScript too.

(Disclaimer: I work for Shopify.)

Shopify would use this to write the client-side parts. We can now save on a lot of server-side rendering of pages every time a request happens; instead we just send back JSON and Batman.js knows how to change the page accordingly.

We’re already using it internally for non-core projects like our phone support system (Batman.js + Faye + Adhearsion) – it makes for a really responsive web app that’s easy to maintain.

Expect to see this in the core Shopify product very soon :)

I still don't get what I'd use it for. Is it like jquery? Is it like rails?

Batman aims to introduce rails-like conventions for building single-page web apps.

Nick gave a nice demo at JSConf earlier this year: http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2011-nick-small-5293530

Still nada. What does it actually do? A framework for doing what w.r.t. rich JavaScript applications? Is this like Cappuccino? How does this "make development as fast and as painless as possible for developers and designers while giving them lots of power"?

It's a rapid development tool for front-end development. If I'm reading the documation correctly, I think it's based on the MVC architecture.

Sure, you could make your backend in plain Ruby, but if you learn to use Rails you can do things quicker.

Sure, you could make your frontend in plain JavaScript, but if you learn to use batman.js you can do things quicker.

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