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They also tend to turn into huge messy hairballs after years of developers and new business use cases. Not that these are use cases for personal projects, but

by cle 10y ago

They also tend to turn into huge messy hairballs after years of developers and new business use cases. Not that these are use cases for personal projects, but standardized frameworks are valuable for large teams with lots of changing use cases and long-term maintenance requirements.

mattnewton 10y ago
I've seen plenty of Ember apps succumb to the same syndrome- the problem is the developers, who are either incompetent or contractors who care only about the deadline before them. I don't think a framework is a magic cure for bad developers, though maybe because you wrote less code to start it probably does take longer to get to spaghetti hell.
tboyd47 10y ago
It's usually not so bad if you can just keep the amount of client-side code down.
ksk 10y ago
I don't see any long term stability and support in any JS framework. They seem to pop in and out of existence at a fairly rapid pace. What examples do you have of long-term projects that use those frameworks?
- 91bananas 10y ago
  http://backbonejs.org/ http://backbonejs.org/ is my favorite framework. It doesn't do much, I continue to be impressed with it daily. I'm on my second major project with it. It's getting old now in JS years (read, actual years). Doesn't have any steam behind it compared to ember, react, angular. But it continues to work daily
  - at-fates-hands 10y ago
    One of the first React workshops I was a part of was put on by Henrik Joreteg. In the first five minutes he said something along the lines of: "React has its place, and I mean Backbone still works and is a fucking amazing library." Then went on a mini rant about how people abandon libraries because they're new and shiny and its not because they're bad or deficient in any way - which is why he used his Backbone example. It's still awesome, it still works incredibly well and is still very much supported by a large, well informed community. Then of course, he went back to telling us how awesome ReactJS was and why we should want to try it and use it for our projects.
  - mohaine 10y ago
    I hate backbone. Lots of boilerplate and everyone I see a set("field",value) I die a little inside. Also, everything of any size I've seen written in backbone turned into an unmaintainable mess.
    - 91bananas 10y ago
      What boilerplate? React is all the rage now and it looks a hell of a lot like a backbone view. It has an initialize function, render, events, some constants, and the handlers for events. I don't know how much more minimal you can get than that. As for the unmaintainable part, I couldn't disagree more. Maybe you've worked with poor programmers?
      - mohaine 10y ago
        Really it is the requirement to to redefine your model in backbone that is a deal breaker. Alot of code that just don't have to write in other frameworks, although i understand why it is there. Most of the unmaintainable comes from it being a lighter weight frame work so devs often fall back to jquery. This is OK if you can figure out exactly where they added that trigger. Way to often that is overly hard. It could be pages away. And yes, most of my coworkes are poor programmers. Saddly that is the world we live in and I like frameworks that make them a little easier to live with.
        Tenhundfeld 10y ago
        The issue I've seen with backbone apps, even written by "good programmers", is that no two are alike. So, when you come into a new app, a nontrivial amount of time is spent figuring out how the original programmers are using it, which libraries they pulled in for stuff like model validations, etc. To be fair, that's somewhat due to the fact that I mostly encounter them in consulting arrangements, and I don't know that any of the other frameworks are much better in this respect. I think I've just gotten spoiled by doing most of my work in Rails, a mature opinionated framework.
  - choward 10y ago
    > It doesn't do much You can say that again. I used it for a pretty decent sized project and I'm not sure if it added any value. It doesn't do anything.
    - 91bananas 10y ago
      Did you use it? Usually for it to do things you have to instantiate the objects, use their functions etc.
- SkyMarshal 10y ago
  Anything open sourced by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. and used in their own applications. Those will probably see ongoing development for a while.
  - nxc18 10y ago
    Long term development <> long term stability. See Angular 1 -> Angular 2.
    - cableshaft 10y ago
      Well, Angular 1 still seems to work pretty well, at least for now. It's not a requirement to upgrade to Angular 2 yet, and it's not like Angular 1 apps will suddenly break and lose all their functionality, at least not without intentional decisions made by browsers to not support it.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Ember is fairly solid and doesn't seem to be dying.
UK-AL 10y ago
The thing is you don't actually need that much javascript. 5-10 years ago mostly everything was server side, and js was mostly for cosmetic stuff.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  This depends upon the business case. Some just do not permit reloading the whole page for every server interaction. Very interactive multiplayer games come to mind.
- mehh 10y ago
  Sure, but now the use of rich javascript clients enables a bunch of use cases and workflows and interactions that was previously not possible. It has enriched the user experience, some times unnecessarily, but thats down to the implementers not the technology.

by cle 10y ago

mattnewton 10y ago

I've seen plenty of Ember apps succumb to the same syndrome- the problem is the developers, who are either incompetent or contractors who care only about the deadline before them. I don't think a framework is a magic cure for bad developers, though maybe because you wrote less code to start it probably does take longer to get to spaghetti hell.

tboyd47 10y ago

It's usually not so bad if you can just keep the amount of client-side code down.

ksk 10y ago

I don't see any long term stability and support in any JS framework. They seem to pop in and out of existence at a fairly rapid pace. What examples do you have of long-term projects that use those frameworks?

91bananas 10y ago
http://backbonejs.org/ http://backbonejs.org/ is my favorite framework. It doesn't do much, I continue to be impressed with it daily. I'm on my second major project with it. It's getting old now in JS years (read, actual years). Doesn't have any steam behind it compared to ember, react, angular. But it continues to work daily
- at-fates-hands 10y ago
  One of the first React workshops I was a part of was put on by Henrik Joreteg. In the first five minutes he said something along the lines of: "React has its place, and I mean Backbone still works and is a fucking amazing library." Then went on a mini rant about how people abandon libraries because they're new and shiny and its not because they're bad or deficient in any way - which is why he used his Backbone example. It's still awesome, it still works incredibly well and is still very much supported by a large, well informed community. Then of course, he went back to telling us how awesome ReactJS was and why we should want to try it and use it for our projects.
- mohaine 10y ago
  I hate backbone. Lots of boilerplate and everyone I see a set("field",value) I die a little inside. Also, everything of any size I've seen written in backbone turned into an unmaintainable mess.
  - 91bananas 10y ago
    What boilerplate? React is all the rage now and it looks a hell of a lot like a backbone view. It has an initialize function, render, events, some constants, and the handlers for events. I don't know how much more minimal you can get than that. As for the unmaintainable part, I couldn't disagree more. Maybe you've worked with poor programmers?
    - mohaine 10y ago
      Really it is the requirement to to redefine your model in backbone that is a deal breaker. Alot of code that just don't have to write in other frameworks, although i understand why it is there. Most of the unmaintainable comes from it being a lighter weight frame work so devs often fall back to jquery. This is OK if you can figure out exactly where they added that trigger. Way to often that is overly hard. It could be pages away. And yes, most of my coworkes are poor programmers. Saddly that is the world we live in and I like frameworks that make them a little easier to live with.
      - Tenhundfeld 10y ago
        The issue I've seen with backbone apps, even written by "good programmers", is that no two are alike. So, when you come into a new app, a nontrivial amount of time is spent figuring out how the original programmers are using it, which libraries they pulled in for stuff like model validations, etc. To be fair, that's somewhat due to the fact that I mostly encounter them in consulting arrangements, and I don't know that any of the other frameworks are much better in this respect. I think I've just gotten spoiled by doing most of my work in Rails, a mature opinionated framework.
- choward 10y ago
  > It doesn't do much You can say that again. I used it for a pretty decent sized project and I'm not sure if it added any value. It doesn't do anything.
  - 91bananas 10y ago
    Did you use it? Usually for it to do things you have to instantiate the objects, use their functions etc.
SkyMarshal 10y ago
Anything open sourced by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. and used in their own applications. Those will probably see ongoing development for a while.
- nxc18 10y ago
  Long term development <> long term stability. See Angular 1 -> Angular 2.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    Well, Angular 1 still seems to work pretty well, at least for now. It's not a requirement to upgrade to Angular 2 yet, and it's not like Angular 1 apps will suddenly break and lose all their functionality, at least not without intentional decisions made by browsers to not support it.
vertex-four 10y ago
Ember is fairly solid and doesn't seem to be dying.

UK-AL 10y ago

The thing is you don't actually need that much javascript. 5-10 years ago mostly everything was server side, and js was mostly for cosmetic stuff.

paulryanrogers 10y ago
This depends upon the business case. Some just do not permit reloading the whole page for every server interaction. Very interactive multiplayer games come to mind.
mehh 10y ago
Sure, but now the use of rich javascript clients enables a bunch of use cases and workflows and interactions that was previously not possible. It has enriched the user experience, some times unnecessarily, but thats down to the implementers not the technology.