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Comment by grimtrigger | Hacker News Reader

If you're just getting started with frameworks, I'd recommend Backbone. You can learn it in half the time it takes to understand Angular and it'll be a good introduction to MV*. This is probably why its more popular than Angular - its easier and its good enough. Angular has a lot of "magic" which can be intimidating and frustrating. Also writing JS logic in html just feels icky when separation was the manifesto for so many years.

That being said, there's many times where I work with Backbone and I feel like its missing pieces it should have. I don't have too much experience with Angular but it seems to be a much more complete choice.

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> If you're just getting started with frameworks, I'd recommend Backbone.

Backbone only is not enough to do any serious kind of work today.One always end up with tons of plugins making it as complicated as EmberJS or AngularJS. There is no serious view layer,so one has to use React,Vue,or Ractive. The router sucks,frankly,so one has to replace it. The model layer doesnt handle relationships between model,so one ends up using something else...

There is nothing good in Backbone today frankly.It was one of the first successfull "clientside" framework ,yet refused to evolve(like underscore or coffeescript today),refused to incorporate good ideas from third parties that would have made it still relevant today.

There is no future in Backbone.Maybe there is still a place for a Backbone like framework that would still be based on jQuery and would incorporate a better view layer. But Backbone itself is dead.

I personally prefer AngularJS ,not because of its directives but because I strongly believe in IoC containers over any other way to build and wire objects. But I think EmberJS is as good.

> There is nothing good in Backbone today frankly.It was one of the first successfull "clientside" framework

AngularJS was released in 2009 [1], whereas Backbone was released a year later in 2010 [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone.js

> AngularJS was released in 2009 [1], whereas Backbone was released a year later in 2010 [2].

Sure,that's why i said

> It was one of the first successfull "clientside" framework

Did you miss the word successfull or what?

furthermore old angularjs looked more like Adobe Spry than current AngularJS,while Backbone hardly evolved(which is not good of course).

> while Backbone hardly evolved(which is not good of course)

Backbone is a much simpler library than Angular. There's less of a need for it to evolve, since it's meant to be extended on a per project basis.

I disagree totally.

If you're doing any kind of rich-client js development without data binding, you're going to have a real bad time.

React will fit the bill here, and can be used with Backbone.

> If you're just getting started with frameworks, I'd recommend Backbone. You can learn it in half the time it takes to understand Angular and it'll be a good introduction to MV*.

Backbone is easier to learn, agreed. I would recommend checking out a list of sites built with Angular & Backbone too.

Sites built with Angular: https://builtwith.angularjs.org/

Sites built with Backbone: http://backbonejs.org/#examples-documentcloud

IMO Backbone is overly complex and it's a lot harder to pervasively use data binding to templates. Didn't really feel like I realized huge productivity gains with that technique until I met Angular.

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