4 ms·

> "Oh, why are you using Backbone? That's an old and obsolete technology. You should learn React/Vue/Elm." I have no problem with jQuery (I still use it on ani

by camus2 9y ago

> "Oh, why are you using Backbone? That's an old and obsolete technology. You should learn React/Vue/Elm." I have no problem with jQuery (I still use it on animation heavy websites), but Backbone wasn't a good framework IMHO. it was not very useful and it lacked the component model that is well understood by web frameworks today (backbone didn't support composite views).There is no reason to use Backbone nowadays. I think Vue.js is a good replacement for the people who seek simplicity and a clear data model. And it doesn't require any asset pipeline or whatever, it's just a little JS file. Angular 2,4,whatever and Embers are frameworks that oozes with complexity, for very little benefits in my opinion.

bshimmin 9y ago
Backbone provided some useful stuff for working with collections, a router, and, perhaps most importantly, structure to your projects. You have to look at it in the context of the time it was written - it predated React, for example, by a number of years. It was lightweight and the code was easy to follow, the documentation was good, and the API was certainly very stable. Nested views were problematic, undeniably, and did lead in the real world to a big old mess that wasn't much better than the jQuery spaghetti it was intended to replace, with events bubbling all over the place and unnecessary re-rendering and so on. I led a team that built a big Backbone app, back when it was very much in vogue, and it was certainly hard to get this stuff right in practice - perhaps not impossible, but harder than one would have preferred.
- boubiyeah 9y ago
  Yep, backbone was just like 200-300 lines of code. It was incrementally better than JQuery alone but suffered from the same limitations when trying to build apps with lots of views. If you wanted performances, you had a separated creation and update path, and you were back to Jquery spaghetti and tight coupling between DOM and JS via CSS selectors. Shaming shouldn't be a thing, but It's fair to say no one should start a backbone project in 2017, unless it was dead simple, in which case you can use pretty much any tech anyway.

by camus2 9y ago

bshimmin 9y ago

Backbone provided some useful stuff for working with collections, a router, and, perhaps most importantly, structure to your projects. You have to look at it in the context of the time it was written - it predated React, for example, by a number of years. It was lightweight and the code was easy to follow, the documentation was good, and the API was certainly very stable. Nested views were problematic, undeniably, and did lead in the real world to a big old mess that wasn't much better than the jQuery spaghetti it was intended to replace, with events bubbling all over the place and unnecessary re-rendering and so on. I led a team that built a big Backbone app, back when it was very much in vogue, and it was certainly hard to get this stuff right in practice - perhaps not impossible, but harder than one would have preferred.

boubiyeah 9y ago
Yep, backbone was just like 200-300 lines of code. It was incrementally better than JQuery alone but suffered from the same limitations when trying to build apps with lots of views. If you wanted performances, you had a separated creation and update path, and you were back to Jquery spaghetti and tight coupling between DOM and JS via CSS selectors. Shaming shouldn't be a thing, but It's fair to say no one should start a backbone project in 2017, unless it was dead simple, in which case you can use pretty much any tech anyway.