Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

What kind of "batteries" are you looking to be included? Knockoutjs doesn't automate saving to the server (though it can do everything up to the Ajax call), and IMO it has a pretty intuitive model and near-perfect docs. As a recent convert, I would recommend that you consider it. Unless you've already rejected it for your own reasons, in which case I'm curious what those are.

PS: the tutorial does have a little opaque magic. IMO the biggest need in the docs is some overarching theory. The trick is that applyBindings applies to the whole document by default, but can be restricted to another DOM node.

View on HN

Knockout only really works if you totally intermix your model code with it. You have to annotate every darn thing until it's impossible to see what the underlying logic was.

Angular's docs suck, but my own code is safely isolated and can be easily developed and tested in isolation.

Hm. In my case, I would have had to invent something like ko.observable anyway, so I guess it works for me. Maybe I'll learn better when things get more complicated.

I'm not saying that it's wrong. KO's approach is a defensible architectural alternative. I guess I took an unnecessarily snotty tone in my previous comment.

However, KO's design it didn't sit well with how I wanted things to work. Basically I want plain javascript for my own core logic and then to have round-trip binding to the user interface with a minimum of fuss.

For simple cases, Angular does that reasonably well. More complicated cases require a much more intimate engagement with Angular's design and architecture, which is where my gripe about the docs becomes relevant.

No offense taken. I did find that my "model" code was basically the same as the viewmodel. I'm not sure how much that matters or how hard it will be to change, hence "maybe I'll learn better".

I was looking for a framework which can handle as much as possible of the configuration, plumbing and any other processes which are involved in web development. I know that is not exciting and causes limitations, but being a novice in this field, I do not want to be messing around with the basics. I rather want to focus on the core business aspects of my venture. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com