I recently had to choose between client-side frameworks for a fairly complicated browser-based application. I had no real requirements, except that I really pr

I recently had to choose between client-side frameworks for a fairly complicated browser-based application. I had no real requirements, except that I really preferred easily using CoffeeScript. Obviously all of them can be used with CoffeeScript, but some easier than others. I embraced and evaluated Batman. This was before they updated their documentation a couple months ago. Their docs were so brief that I had to consult the (partially annotated) source for basic things like bindings, routings, etc. I built a little example in about 5 days and called it quits. When it gets to 1.0 I'll take another look. Their new documentation looks promising. I then went pursuing frameworks with automatic 2-way binding like Knockout (and batman). I really didn't want to go w/ Backbone because it doesn't provide that feature. But what I ended up finding is that implicit 2-way bindings like that are more of a performance blackbox. Not altogether bad, but that they have enough downside that they're not an absolute must-have. I ended up choosing Backbone flavor Chaplin. Chaplin is an opinionated implementation of Backbone written in CoffeeScript. It implements a Pub/Sub message bus using Backbone Events. It gives you defined structure that makes it easier to get started. And it provides garbage collection which can be super helpful. When a controller (and its models) is swapped out there are a lot of circular references that have to be manually broken for it to be garbage collected. Chaplin takes care of that for us. And Brunch.io includes Chaplin now in its default recipe, which is also super helpful.