Building a JS front end only makes sense to me if you're leveraging a complete UI kit on the client side to ease handling of commonly-encountered UI problems: s

Building a JS front end only makes sense to me if you're leveraging a complete UI kit on the client side to ease handling of commonly-encountered UI problems: sortable, filterable, lists; autocomplete; tokenized inputs; etc. The hassle of building a custom UI and event strategy without a pre-packaged UI kit seems like a recipe for headaches, but that may be a function of my own limitations in Javascript. I've tried it in Backbone and in Sproutcore 2 beta 2. Both are very promising, but I found myself dealing with so many common UI use cases that I really wished for plug-and-play UI kit modules. Also, the online community for JS frameworks so young that it's hard to find other people's solutions. For instance, I wanted to hook into devise to authenticate users and store the current_user on the client-side. I ended up making my own solution, with no guidance from google. As a self-taught developer working alone on a few projects, I always feel better when I can at least find a random gist of another solution, if for no other reason than to see if I've missed a feature of the framework in my solution. Given how incredibly useful these JS frameworks are for imposing some structure and convention, I expect the online guidance to improve drastically over the coming year.