Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

React was a major improvement over Backbone + Marionette. Pre-jQuery was a shit-show as they hadn't even standardised the DOM.

Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.

View on HN

XML, XMLHttpRequest, and XSLT in IE 5 was peak web dev for me. Never been more productive.

This feels like the equivalent of "whatever music you liked at 16 defines your taste"

I suppose. And I'm not at all saying there's nothing better today, or that it would be possible to build today's web apps using that stack. Just at that point in time and with those technologies everything was clicking.

Back in the days when launching a website was an event, and sometimes included junket trips to attend.

Give me Backbone + anything over React. Backbone was the last time I really felt close to the web page I was creating.

We're still using it for our stuff (via our @beanbag/spina TypeScript wrapper for Backbone that has a few additional niceties), and I feel the same way. We can be as close to the DOM as we need (or let something manage it for our view for us), we can be smart about where data lives and how things interact with it/listen for changes, and we get a decent little object model that doesn't dictate how we think about everything.

Very happy still with the Backbone way of building webapps.

Oh boy the ActiveXObject brings back some ~~ptsd~~ fond memories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com