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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Examples use Coffeescript instead of universally accessible Javascript. Looks very useful though; I've just started learning about Backbone, and the lack of a "right way of doing things" is disconcerting, coming from a lot of Rails usage lately. It takes me back to the days of doing a lot of stuff by hand.

Even without that uncertainty, it's definitely a bit tricky to move to thinking about everything being in the browser.

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@davidw, Just use emberjs and focus on your app instead of boilerplate code. If you are coming from rails, emberjs is opinionated and should fit your style of thinking.

Emberjs makes building non-trivial easy while backbone makes building non-trivial apps hard but makes building small simple app easy.

People like talking about the size of emberjs but after you finishing stitching together numerous boilerplate code, you might end up with a bigger code base than emberjs and you are worst off as you have to maintain your boilerplate yourself rather than use a community curated codebase.

Two good getting started tutorial: http://trek.github.com/ http://emberjs.com/guides/router_primer/

Please i don't dislike backbonejs but we should use the right tool for the right job, backbone is not the right tool for non trivial app except you like boilerplate code. I also respect Jeremy Ashkenas. So my comments are not hate induced.

> use the right tool for the right job

"Backbone is the wrong tool for anything non-trivial" is just hyperbole.

Getting started with Ember is a lot harder than your comment admits. I tried Ember recently and there was still a lot of stuff that was broken including the data model. That would make building a non-trivial app hard.

What I'm investigating Backbone/Ember/whatever for is a semi-embedded device that will ship with a web interface, so some semblance of stability is a major plus.

As we speak it is used in production by many companies. Click this link to see them all:

https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/wiki/Production-Deployme...

Shopitome is a very fresh deployment using emberjs based on this tweet sent today:

http://twitter.com/inkredabull/status/268017623428657153

http://www.shopittome.com/threads/signup

A few non trivial companies using emberjs in production are:

www.zendesk.com

http://www.squareup.com/

http://livingsocial.com/

http://www.groupon.com

http://www.desk.com/

http://basho.com/

http://travis-ci.org/

http://www.gooddata.com/

Web production != shipping on devices production. You can very easily ship updates to the former whereas the latter is tricky. It means we need to be careful with everything we choose.

@atomical, the link to trek's article above puts it more succintly:

Ember applications start out with a complexity rating of 4/10 but never get much higher than 6/10, regardless of how sophisticated your application becomes. Backbone starts out at 1/10 but complexity grows linearly. This is a natural side effect of the types of applications the two frameworks were specifically created for.

Does Ember have a persistance layer ? like backbone sync ? anyway ,Ember is far from perfect too. The best javascript framework , though not free , is Ext JS.

Yes it does. I have added enough links that touch on that.

https://github.com/emberjs/data

http://emberjs.com/guides/ember-data-lifecycle/

https://speakerdeck.com/tomdale/30 slides for the video below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djhAsWGOImk Tom Dale - Ember-data

https://speakerdeck.com/tchak/ember-data

Genuine question : not knowing coffeescript (if that's indeed the problem), do you find it hard to understand what it represents in pure js ?

I find it's a bit of a distraction. I think I know what's going on, but I'm not 100% sure.

It's hard to make the cognitive leap from coffeescript to javascript, while also trying to grok the actual subject at hand.

It doesn't make much sense for tutorials to be written in coffeescript unless they are specifically coffeescript tutorials

It's not that hard but instead of thinking what code does, i have to think first what that code mean in javascript.

Writing a tutorial / informative blog post in coffeescript is like : Giving an English lesson in Chinese while teacher and students are native speakers of English.

You can find pretty much the same behavior in thoughtbot's backbone-support. I highly recommend it and it's written in javascript.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/backbone-support

It has a CompositeView and a SwappingRouter that you should use in place of Backbone.View and Backbone.Router

I'm glad it's written in coffeescript, it's less verbose and easier to read.

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