Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

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I would say it's because you guys are doing it wrong. Backbone is just a very bare-bones backbone for your app. As you say, views don't provide anything. In fact backbone barely helps you with organizing your code at all. It's great for making a todos app but terrible for anything stretching across multiple pages, and with more than 10 views on a page.

Let's be serious here.

DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!!

DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!!

DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!!

Use one of the higher level frameworks built around backbone.

The most flexible / clean, decoupled framework (my preference) is: https://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.marionette

If you like coffeescript: https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin

If you want *only good views/layout: https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone.layoutmanager

If you want modelbinding: https://github.com/mikeric/rivets

Backbone is very much bring your own module, starting with just backbone is not the way to go for an app of any reasonable size!

I'm afraid that advice is about 180 degrees away from the truth.

If you look at the kinds of large scale projects that people are building with Backbone:

http://backbonejs.org/#examples

... or the new Hulu.com, from earlier this week -- I'm not aware of any of the sites on that list using any of the libraries you're recommending.

@jashkenas Those sites use their own custom libraries that do about the equivalent of what the libraries I suggested use. I say this not out of any disrespect, I love backbone, but backbone doesn't provide enough to build a complex app. Does it have memory management? No. Does it provide a pub/sub pattern? No. Does it handle views/nesting subviews and layout management? No.

You can roll your own library, of course, it's not that hard. But you can also not reinvent the wheel and use an existing open source solution.

If you read the complaints in this thread it's mostly *backbone doesn't do enough. Backbone is great as 1 layer of abstraction, but you need more layers in order to code effectively.

    > Does it have memory management?

JavaScript has memory management; JavaScript has a garbage collector. If you structure an app (with any library) not to leak references, then no manual memory management or bookkeeping is needed. Not having additional memory management is a feature, not a bug.

    > Does it provide a pub/sub pattern?

Yes. That's Backbone.Events, which is the core how models work with changes, and can be mixed in to any object.

    > Does it handle views/nesting subviews and layout management?

Right -- your UI and your HTML is your business. Not having an explicit view hierarchy or layout paradigm is part of the reason why Backbone Views can be used in the kinds of diverse environments you see in that list of examples ... from "enhanced" static pages like Pitchfork.com, to interactive SVG-based graphics like SeakGeek's stadium maps, to multiplatform hybrid web/native views like LinkedIn Mobile.

That said, if you think you've got an idea for a "layout" feature that would help with UI across the spectrum, it would make for a great pull request.

> > Does it have memory management?

> JavaScript has memory management; JavaScript has a garbage collector.

The problem with javascript apps is not leaking memory, it's forgetting to unbind events and/or binding events multiple times.

Angular.js and Knockout.js relieve you of this problem because they handle all the event binding so you don't have to worry about it.

  If you structure an app (with any library) not to leak references

But that's boilerplate.

  That's Backbone.Events, which is the core how models work with changes, and can be mixed in to any object.

But it's messy out of the box for other parts of your app without boilerplate. You need to structure your events somehow. It doesn't take much code and the libraries that I recommend are very small.

I don't think Backbone necessarily needs more features. It's great for certain sites that uses Backbone in limited ways. I'm talking about making an entire website end to end in Backbone, something that most of your examples do not try to do. But if you're making a whole app in backbone, not just a feature or a widget, something with many many routes and regions that swap nested views constantly, you'll need a bigger library.

So, backbone alone is fine for apps that's mostly traditional / server based, with some client side features. If the entire app is built in backbone then you'll want to build on top of it. There are many many frameworks popping up around Backbone and they should be supported by Backbone. Developers clearly need them or else there wouldn't be so many of them.

I'm not sure if this is something that could be helped with some doc changes, but it took me awhile to figure out that pubsub is exactly what Backbone.Events gives you. And even then, I only figured that out from reading tbranyen's code.

This might be something that you're thinking people should work towards... Aura (http://addyosmani.github.com/aura/ ) "an event driven architecture built on top of backbone"

Also check out http://thoraxjs.org/beta

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