Ask HN: Angular, Backbone, React. Help Me Choose

3 points·peterchon··4 comments

As I get more serious in building web applications, I can't seem to decide between Angular, backbone, and React. What's your experience?

edit: specifically for someone who's hasn't done a whole lot of MVC dev work.

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I only have experience with Angular & Backbone.

I much prefer Backbone, because there's much less boilerplate code, less "magic" and it's not nearly as opinionated as Angular. You can bend it to your use, rather than bend your usage to it's preferred way of doing things.

I have experience with Angular and Backbone. Backbone will definitely give you more control, but you have to make more choices. Angular is definitely generating more buzz, but Backbone has a sizable community too, and is more mature and battle-tested. That's a big deal in the Javascript framework space, where the scenery can change drastically month to month. If you're doing something small, or you have a little extra time, it's worth getting familiar with React, Angular, and Ember too. TodoMVC is a nice way to get a sneak peak at the various idioms of each framework without investing a huge amount of time.

My preference is Backbone. Angular is very popular especially in this place but many say it's super complicated without a reason and I agree.

To give you more choices, I have been really enjoying Meteor.

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