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> I mean I don't want to spend time learning a framework that might be dead 2 years from now (remember prototype ?)

2 years ago I jumped ship from KnockoutJS to AngularJS. Backbone was also quite hyped out around the same time. All three of them are still around and frankly speaking it wouldn't have been a problem for me if the one I picked died by now. The skills I learned in Knockout helped me quickly learn Angular.

Think of it this way, learning on its own, regardless of what you're learning is valuable. My suggesstion, take a day and examine whatever frameworks you've heard of and pick one and learn it.

> Most of my client side code is pretty much jquery (that I try to keep organized), and it works most of the time. Then I see people referring to that practice as "jquery soup" and I'm starting to think I'm doing it wrong.

Possibly the biggest advantage of Angular is what it does for code organization. With JQuery, you've got to organize it yourself, and while some things are easily organized, others can easily turn into a big mess.

Angular is very big on separation of concerns, modules, dependency injection, etc. Basically, what Angular does, is provide a lot of mature code organization concepts that have been common place on the server-side for ages, to browser-side code. Javascript has long been the domain of little ad-hoc scripts. Stuff like JQuery makes it easier to work with fairly standalone libraries, whereas Angular does for the browser what frameworks like Spring and Wicket did for the server.

Is it what you need? Depends on whether Spring and Wicket are what you need.

xtrumanx said it well. What you learn while picking up any one of these newer frameworks will serve you well.

3 months ago I'd never touched any of them, at least not successfully. Then I got a project to build an app-like mobile website for my company on top of Drupal. I spent a few days trying to figure out how to fake it with jQuery and prefetching, all the while knowing that one of these frameworks was the better way to go. I spent a morning spinning up a couple of JSON feeds in Drupal and the afternoon learning enough Angular to get something to show up on the page, and I think it's fair to say that in the 2 months since that day my developmental worldview (and my productivity) has shifted considerably.

Regardless of how long Angular sticks around (though I suspect it'll be a little while), what I've learned from working with it nonstop for the last 2 months has definitely made me a better developer overall.

The framework battle is really between Backbone, Angular, and Ember. No one else I can think of off hand has the marketshare that those 3 do..

And each has their own strengths and unique opinions. My preference is Ember, but it's just that, a preference.

Even if not writing SPAs, I think frameworks can be great for building pieces of interactivity as cohesive modules. To me, this is a great use case for Backbone or React.