Sonny – Fast single page app engine

Yes, huu.la is smooth.

I've done that for our company's websites. We were sort of forced into it by search engines but overall it's much better now. The frontend is written in Backbone.Marionette and it wasn't exactly simple.

Because it's a slow, broken reimplementation of things which Angular already does better and which only work well in any case when you're on a blazing-fast low-latency Internet connection, or better yet browsing localhost -- did I mention those times I posted earlier were on desktop? I shudder to think what'd happen if I tried loading it on my phone.

And it also appears to be implemented entirely in a single 1300-line-long Javascript file, which, okay, I guess? There are no tests -- yes, there are examples in a directory called "tests", but there are no tests, which is to say there's no way to get any confidence that modifications in that 1300-line Javascript blob haven't produced regressions or new bugs.

Presumably the author has learned something in the process of writing it, although I can't imagine what that may be. I don't know why he'd spend his time on this, though; from the looks of his Github account, he's also written an in-browser Pokemon game engine which looks pretty cool, so I don't know what value he sees in hacking up a half-baked me-too web framework.

And it's a pretty unfortunate failure mode. IMHO, it should at least render a basic failure message that is removed by a working site.