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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I am a backend developer sporadically doing front end to speed things up (as in: back end is done, time to help the other guys with the front end).

Why is this better than jQuery? I haven't looked at the full code base and documentation but did watch the 25 min demo video posted in this thread and thought: "Well, I can do all of this with jQuery too probably just-as fast.". What makes this different? Am I missing something?

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It depends on the scale of the project. If what you want to do can be done with 200 or 300 lines of JavaScript using jQuery, then fine. Go for it!

But I've seen codebases with over 10,000 lines of JavaScript, using only jQuery, and it isn't a pleasant sight. You either end up writing your own ad-hoc framework to add structure, or, more likely, you end up with a bug-ridden, unmaintainable mess where you're writing basically the same code over and over. A framework like Ember or Angular provides structure and takes out a lot of the grunt work of making a large, single-page app.

Usually most of the people realise the need for this kind of tools when they are facing a need/requirement to develop a single page web application (SPA). If you don't need to make one then it's ok to use jquery or even add some PJAX to make your web site look more snappy. But if you have to develop a SPA, then you can't go far with jQuery because it just wasn't created for this type of things, you have to think about models, templates, about application state management and all other stuff, this is where frameworks like Ember and Angular shine.

Ember is a framework, jQuery is a library. jQuery doesn't really give you much of anything that you don't have in regular JavaScript, it just makes things a bit more concise and smoothes over some browser inconsistencies. Ember provides you with a structure for your application, two-way binding, a template language (Handlebars), a router, and many other things. It's not better than jQuery, it's a completely different type of thing.

JQuery is great, but it doesn't scale up well. Frameworks like Ember allow you to build bigger applications in an easy, clean way. JQuery tends toward spaghetti.

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