Hacker News Reader

Comment by obiefernandez | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Backbone is dominant, but after a couple months of using AngularJS on an everyday basis I'm ready to switch and never look back. Hands-down best framework I've ever worked with. The pleasure I get from it reminds me of the early days of Rails, when the leap in productivity was palpable.

View on HN

While Backbone's strength is its lack of assumptions and 'freeness', angular forces developers to strictly follow their constructs. Marionette [0] is an extension of backbone that also forces developers to follow constructs that lead to scalable, modular web apps. Marionette makes backbone feel like a tool to make prototypes.

0: http://marionettejs.com/

But how big is its community?

Marionette has a great community, and is super easy to get help with things. I've been involved in the marionette community for a while and it has always been absolutely wonderful. You can almost always get help directly from the core team on their gitter chat here (https://gitter.im/marionettejs/backbone.marionette), and I have met in person with all of the core team members at meetups, they are very smart, dedicated and friendly.

While angular has tons of beginner hype because of the bootstrap effect (don't learn a technology, just put it in your html tags!), I've found that marionette tends to attract a more mature developer crowd, and as a framework is much better suited to building large and complex apps anyway because of the strict modularity and separation of concerns. I say this from experience both seeing and working on very large and complex apps with marionette. And if you don't believe me, ask some of the developers at Etsy, who build with marionette.

The community is a hell of a lot smaller than something like angular, but I see that as a huge benefit, especially when that means no proliferation of beginner problems, and easy access to the core team for help or feedback.

Sizable enough. I never struggle to find answers to Marionette questions, and the documentation is GREAT. Plus the code is well commented at all the extensibility points.

There are also three excellent books[0] about Marionette, and about 3x more Marionette questions on Stack Overflow than React questions (for what that's worth).

We introduced it into our Backbone app and haven't looked back. It's great.

[0]https://leanpub.com/building-backbone-plugins https://leanpub.com/marionette-gentle-introduction https://leanpub.com/marionette-serious-progression

I've always used Backbone more as a collection of libraries and in that way its nice for lighter weight use cases and plays well with other JS code. I'm not sure if it has (or needs) enough structure to build the same sort of apps as you'd build with Angular or Ember and I've always kind of found these comparisons a bit unfair. Kind of like choosing between Sinatra and Rails.

I totally agree. One of the things that made me give it a try was the community support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com