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I do not mean this to sound cynical, but are people actually building full-fledged web apps with these frameworks? Where are they? Any public examples? The thi

I do not mean this to sound cynical, but are people actually building full-fledged web apps with these frameworks? Where are they? Any public examples? The thing is that these tools generally solve the easiest part of problem space, yet paradoxically they make the novel and interesting parts much more difficult. They may pay off if your job is an assembly line banging out trivial CRUD apps, but I just don't see the real value for any reasonable scale project. I looked at Angular a while back and while it got rid of a few lines of code, it made the necessary edges of a modern web app incredibly ugly (and truly the biggest waste of time is fighting with your framework). That's one of the reasons I like Backbone's minimalism -- it is more a simple toolbag and less an all encompassing solution that relieves you of any reason to make decisions. Backbone also works very well in a non-pure client-side web app, which are much more common. Seeing these comparisons I am increasingly getting the impression the discussion is dominated by people procrastinating from their projects, argue over the number of lines of "boilerplate" necessary to create an iterator, which is something that will have negligible significance later on.

ganarajpr 14y ago
Could you define the "novel and interesting parts"? Perhaps examples of what they are ? If you are fighting with Angular there is probably a reason. You probably did not read this : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14994391/how-do-i-think-in-angularjs-if-i-have-a-jquery-background http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14994391/how-do-i-think-i... In my day job, I am working in Knockout now and as a general principle I dont do DOM Manipulation in my ViewModels. I can, and knockout allows me to. But I dont. I think that just this one single and simple rule has made me a better programmer. Do you remember Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid? When he was teaching the kid to learn Karate he wasnt teaching him Karate moves was he? He was teaching him "wax on", "wax off". If the kid had thought "I know better" and fought against this rule he would never have learnt karate. He would have gone home, got beaten up by the kids in his block and also have lost that tournament in the first round. Its the same with Angular and its rules. If you want to win - dont fight it.. persevere till you understand the significance of wax on and wax off and in the end, trust me, you will feel it . You will end up being a better programmer. To start with your wax on, wax off - read that SO answer.
- romaniv 14y ago
  From the answer: "First know that Single-page apps are apps. They're not webpages." This is an artificial dichotomy that aims to obscure architectural deficiencies and explain away usability problems.
  - camus 14y ago
    I agree , they are really webpages.
ekidd 14y ago
I do not mean this to sound cynical, but are people actually building full-fledged web apps with these frameworks? Where are they? Any public examples? I'm building a large, complicated app for paying customers with Ember.js. Now that I've actually climbed the learning curve, I'm incredibly happy with the choice. The application has some large, CRUD-like components, but it also involves things like custom touch widgets and extensive drag and drop. However, it should be kept in mind that Ember.js (and more specifically, the unreleased Ember Data library) is not a mature framework. 95% of the features I want to implement practically fall from my fingertips, and it feels glorious. The remaining 5% require diving deep into the internals of Ember Data. I'm tolerably good at that sort of thing, so it's a reasonable choice for me. But people who don't feel up to reading the source should probably avoid using Ember Data and stick with using jQuery to load JSON into regular Ember.Object instances (which works fine). I haven't seen any big Angular apps first hand, but I know some former Backbone users who are diving in, and they also sound quite enthusiastic about their choice.
ghc 14y ago
Yes, there are people building full-fledged web apps...at least with AngularJS and Backbone. Hubspot uses a lot of Backbone in their products, and they're a large company at this point. Google uses AngularJS...the Youtube app for PS3 is written in Angular, for example. If you find yourself fighting with Angular, it's because you're new to it. Angular is a very rich library...I believe it's definitely possible to do the equivalent of "programming Java in Python" coming from another client library to Angular.
- dindresto 14y ago
  Not only for the PS3, you can access it online: https://www.youtube.com/tv https://www.youtube.com/tv
  - ganarajpr 14y ago
    OMG dint know that... Thank you sooo freaking much!!!
retro212 14y ago
disclaimer: I work for Bitovi, and I'm a CanJS core comitter Short answer: yes, people do build real apps with these frameworks. I stumbled upon JavaScriptMVC (CanJS was extracted from JMVC) 4 years ago when I was building application with a lot of front end code, I think we had around 10k lines of JavaScript in various modules. Trying to build something like that without a framework was a huge pain, and JMVC helped here a lot. In last few years (after I started working for Bitovi) I worked on pretty big enterprise level applications, and besides being able to build things in cleaner way, a huge plus was ability to allow less experienced developers (from the companies we did consulting for) to implement stuff with familiar structure and without needing to care about memory leaks, zombie events and similar stuff. IMO CanJS is the best framework currently available, but I'm extremely biased. In the end I don't think it matters which framework people choose because they will get a lot of value just by using any of them. That said, I would never again use a DOM-centric approach for frontend apps. Live binding is a huge game changer and data centric apps are (in my experience) less buggy and get stuff done with less code.
porker 14y ago
What would you call "the necessary edges of a modern web app"? I agree that these frameworks don't meet all my web app pain points, but thought I was the only one.
analog 14y ago
There's a list of Backbone examples at http://backbonejs.org/#examples http://backbonejs.org/#examples
gline 14y ago
I'm not totally sure it will have been the right choice in retrospect but it was effectively this blog post: http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html that lead me to prototype using ember. I believe Square's analytics platform - not a "full" web app but a pretty substantial one - is still in production deployment based on ember. Of course, they're probably using whatever version of ember was around 18 months ago, and there have been radical changes since... It feels very likely to me that these javascript frameworks represent a substantial component of the future of this kind of development. People smarter than I am seem to feel that angular is 'better technology' than ember, or at least that in looking like extensible html it has more in common with the eventual future than ember does. I'm actually surprised, in this spate of MVC framework posts, that Meteor hasn't gotten more of a mention. In some ways it's younger than the others, and it has some idiosyncrasies (it doesn't actually require that the client and the serve both be written in javascript but you'd never know if from the web site). But the meteor team is incredibly smart and the company is well financed - and they're spending a lot of time and energy on one of the most interesting aspects of the problem, something ember and angular have not worked out: how to synchronize models and data between the client and the server. Meteor has a special protocol for handling this, such that when deployed properly if the data changes in a database the model in the client automatically updates to reflect this. As someone building a complicated analytical engine with computations done in a python / C++ back-end and structure results visualized in javascript, the idea of being able to reuse models in both places is appealing and the idea that I wouldn't have to spend as much time on data synchronization is almost enough to try to make the switch...
- laughfactory 14y ago
  I too am a little surprised at how little attention Meteor seems to get. I attribute this to the fact that it sells itself as a client + server technology, rather than a potential client-side only tech (being fed by whatever server you want). When you sell yourself as a client+server then you might have a difficult time attracting the attention of all those who have significant investment in a different back-end, be it Node, Rails, or whatever. But yes, I agree, Meteor looks awesome. It's also got a steep learning curve. And much like Ember or even--I would argue, Angular--it's difficult to see the "magic" right off the bat. And given how new Angular and Ember and Meteor are, there is still a dearth of tutorials, videos, and books to help new comers see the value and get started. So I'm definitely keeping my eye on Meteor. That said, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Ember have something similar? If the data changes in the database then won't Ember update the client to reflect this? I'm not exactly clear on the distinction between Meteor's "Live HTML" and Ember's approach.
evilduck 14y ago
Where are they? Any public examples? http://builtwith.angularjs.org/ http://builtwith.angularjs.org/
- rdtsc 14y ago
  Not sure if that helps the case or makes it works: Cafe Townsend. A page for a concert. Recipe sharing website. HTML5 Canvas Gradient Creator. Those seems like toy examples one would do that something works, any real/serious public examples?
- TallboyOne 14y ago
  I always hated that page. It makes angular look like a joke. Ember actually has real sites under it's belt, and I think angular shoots itself in the foot having those novelty 'apps' on there and not a single serious thing. Although, Analytics is built with angular if I'm not mistaken.
numo16 14y ago
Discourse[1] uses Ember for all of its front-end and it seems to work pretty well. [1]: http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/
davecap1 14y ago
I built http://www.5by.com http://www.5by.com on AngularJS in about 3 months, and just a few thousand lines of code. The same thing in Backbone would have likely taken a lot more time and a lot more code. It was my first AngularJS app, and I was learning it on the job, which is why it took that long. Overall, Angular is a joy to work with and its conventions force you to write clean, readable, decoupled code.
- romaniv 14y ago
  I find it highly annoying that people who promote client-side MVC and one-page apps always claim that it's trivial to make pages linkable and make browser navigation work, yet the wast majority of real-life single-page apps are missing those features.
  - manmal 14y ago
    If you use Ember correctly, you get a URL for each application state and can use the back button to your liking. The only downside that I can see here is that after going back, the site might take a while until it has fetched all the data (which is not the case for common web apps). Discourse suffers from that.
  - marknutter 14y ago
    That's because it's not generally a requirement for single-page applications. The idea of a single-page app is to make it feel like a desktop application, not to make it highly linkable (which is why it was stupid for Twitter and Gawker to go the single-app route). But yes, it is incredibly trivial to support it using these frameworks.
    - romaniv 14y ago
      That's because it's not generally a requirement Is that a new way of saying "I just don't care about it"? The idea of a single-page app is to make it feel like a desktop application, not to make it highly linkable I've heard that before... from ASP.NET WebForms developers. Incidentally, I've seen quite a few ASP.NET WebForms applications that were literally a single page with changing panels and hidden controls. Needless to say, they were a bloody mess. Thing that normally could be achieved by linking required code changes. Integrations that could be performed via a simple HTTP post were done using complicated web services. Links are the essence of the web platform. Calling something an "app" doesn't change that.
tootie 14y ago
I work for a agency that does pretty substantial projects ($1-10M range) and we've done a fair amount of backbone. Angular has gotten a lot of chatter, but isn't really suitable for our kinds of projects.
rdtsc 14y ago
Same here. Angular is cool it seems for 'look at pictures my dog took on its collar camera' or 'look how small my todo list code is'. Otherwise it is a world of pain fighting with it. Basically once you learn Angular you are an Angular programmer from then on. It has its own terminology and way of doing things, I haven't seen the benefit of going that way. Also looked at its code, founds so much convoluted stuff in that it is a little scary having to run on top of it.
- marknutter 14y ago
  > Basically once you learn Angular you are an Angular programmer from then on Kind of like "once you learn Rails you are a Rails programmer from then on"? I agree that if you're doing nothing but fight with a framework it's probably not a good choice for you. Correct me if I'm wrong but you sound like someone who isn't a big fan of opinionated frameworks in the first place.
  - rdtsc 14y ago
    > Correct me if I'm wrong but you sound like someone who isn't a big fan of opinionated frameworks in the first place. I think you are right. I have been burnt by enough frameworks both picked by me or others that promise the world ('really easy, just use this framework! here is an example of a thing X that we did for a demo that kind of looks like something you might want to do'). Then as soon as you do something not anticipated or unimplemented yet in the framework you hit a wall and decelerate from 100 to 0 pretty quickly. I guess a good framework is one that is extensible and straddles the border between a framework and library.
    - marknutter 14y ago
      > I have been burnt by enough frameworks both picked by me or others that promise the world I've definitely been there, too. I think it's one of the risks in using a framework, but like everything you have to weigh the risks against the rewards. > I guess a good framework is one that is extensible and straddles the border between a framework and library. I think Rails did a good job with this. It provides opinionated defaults but allowed people to swap in other libraries as they needed.
marknutter 14y ago
Well, Google used Angular to re-write DoubleClick, so that's a pretty good example of a large scale application using one of these frameworks in the wild. Ember.js is being used in http://www.discourse.org http://www.discourse.org Anecdotally, my team and I are using Angular.js for our mobile offerings of http://kona.com http://kona.com and have been loving it. I'm not sure why it would be any more difficult to build full-fledged web apps with these frameworks than it would be to use vanilla jQuery or Backbone. Our app has become quite complex and we're still loving Angular.js, for instance. And it's not simply about "getting rid of lines of code", it's also about structure and testability. I can honestly say we haven't had to fight with angular yet but who knows what will happen down the line. For now, we're very happy. > Seeing these comparisons I am increasingly getting the impression the discussion is dominated by people procrastinating from their projects Not sure why this barb is necessary..
- corresation 14y ago
  It wasn't intended as a barb. If anything it was self-reflection, in that I tend to find myself caught up in essentially trivial things when I get caught in procrastination loops. Perhaps I am projecting.
  - marknutter 14y ago
    I read it wrong then. At any rate, fwiw I actually think Ember.js and Angular.js help with procrastination. It's far to easy to get muddled in the details of how to organize a backbone.js or vanilla jQuery application; at least for me. Going with Angular.js let me move forward faster than I would have otherwise.
    - just2n 14y ago
      This is a trade-off that manifests downstream. Highly opinionated there-is-one-right-way frameworks make it easy to get started because you don't have choice, but also get in your way in the long run because you don't have choice, and that also tends to limit what you can do.
LaSombra 14y ago
NewsBlur, http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com is using Backbone.js. http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2012/11/13/backbonification-migrating-javascript-to-backbone/ http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2012/11/13/backbonification-migrat... and https://speakerdeck.com/samuelclay/backbonification-migrating-newsblur-from-dom-spaghetti-to-backbone-dot-js https://speakerdeck.com/samuelclay/backbonification-migratin...
varunkho 14y ago
Last time I checked, Udacity was built on angular.
harpb 14y ago
Build with Backbone http://harpb.com/player/showroom/ http://harpb.com/player/showroom/
olegp 14y ago
StartHQ (https://starthq.com https://starthq.com) is a web app directory and launcher. We are very happy with AngularJS, having used Backbone before. If there's enough interest, I could do a blog post about our experiences. We are actually adding the ability to list which technologies any given app uses, so you will soon be able to search for all apps in production using any of the frameworks listed above.
Joeri 14y ago
I've helped build a 100 K line single page app in ExtJS, and I can see the value ember would have for building that app (have not looked much into angular so cannot comment on that one). What you need in large-scale single page apps are coping mechanisms for the DOM (or as I know it: the root of all evil). Stuff like automatic and on-demand rendering of content, automatic cleanup and event listener removal, nested layouting solutions, strong eventing and routing mechanisms, data binding and automatic data loading, and so on. Any framework that helps you with those things by necessity will invent its own pseudo-DSL, and require you to live in its world. The way I see it, it's all a matter of what you're optimizing for. If you expect to run at most 2000 lines of code in a single page, then backbone is excellent for that. If you expect to run at least 20.000 lines of code in a single page, then something like ember or ext is needed. You can build those in backbone ofcourse, but you'll probably end up rebuilding much of the infrastructure the bigger frameworks give you out of the box. Ofcourse, this is separate from the whole debate on whether a pure client-side approach makes sense on that scale. I still think it does, but I think the mixed model is equally valid (different trade-offs in each case). You're right that the mixed model blends poorly with these frameworks.
ulisesrmzroche 14y ago
There's nothing trivial about keeping data reliably in sync in the browser. It's a hard problem, not something that can be solved by writing a few lines of code in Backbone. It's very misleading to just dismiss it like that.
chauzer 14y ago
Betterment.com completely rewrote it's front-end app with backbone from Flex - https://engineering.betterment.com/2013/02/a-better-front-end/ https://engineering.betterment.com/2013/02/a-better-front-en...

ganarajpr 14y ago

Could you define the "novel and interesting parts"? Perhaps examples of what they are ? If you are fighting with Angular there is probably a reason. You probably did not read this : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14994391/how-do-i-think-in-angularjs-if-i-have-a-jquery-background http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14994391/how-do-i-think-i... In my day job, I am working in Knockout now and as a general principle I dont do DOM Manipulation in my ViewModels. I can, and knockout allows me to. But I dont. I think that just this one single and simple rule has made me a better programmer. Do you remember Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid? When he was teaching the kid to learn Karate he wasnt teaching him Karate moves was he? He was teaching him "wax on", "wax off". If the kid had thought "I know better" and fought against this rule he would never have learnt karate. He would have gone home, got beaten up by the kids in his block and also have lost that tournament in the first round. Its the same with Angular and its rules. If you want to win - dont fight it.. persevere till you understand the significance of wax on and wax off and in the end, trust me, you will feel it . You will end up being a better programmer. To start with your wax on, wax off - read that SO answer.

romaniv 14y ago
From the answer: "First know that Single-page apps are apps. They're not webpages." This is an artificial dichotomy that aims to obscure architectural deficiencies and explain away usability problems.
- camus 14y ago
  I agree , they are really webpages.

ekidd 14y ago

I do not mean this to sound cynical, but are people actually building full-fledged web apps with these frameworks? Where are they? Any public examples? I'm building a large, complicated app for paying customers with Ember.js. Now that I've actually climbed the learning curve, I'm incredibly happy with the choice. The application has some large, CRUD-like components, but it also involves things like custom touch widgets and extensive drag and drop. However, it should be kept in mind that Ember.js (and more specifically, the unreleased Ember Data library) is not a mature framework. 95% of the features I want to implement practically fall from my fingertips, and it feels glorious. The remaining 5% require diving deep into the internals of Ember Data. I'm tolerably good at that sort of thing, so it's a reasonable choice for me. But people who don't feel up to reading the source should probably avoid using Ember Data and stick with using jQuery to load JSON into regular Ember.Object instances (which works fine). I haven't seen any big Angular apps first hand, but I know some former Backbone users who are diving in, and they also sound quite enthusiastic about their choice.

ghc 14y ago

Yes, there are people building full-fledged web apps...at least with AngularJS and Backbone. Hubspot uses a lot of Backbone in their products, and they're a large company at this point. Google uses AngularJS...the Youtube app for PS3 is written in Angular, for example. If you find yourself fighting with Angular, it's because you're new to it. Angular is a very rich library...I believe it's definitely possible to do the equivalent of "programming Java in Python" coming from another client library to Angular.

dindresto 14y ago
Not only for the PS3, you can access it online: https://www.youtube.com/tv https://www.youtube.com/tv
- ganarajpr 14y ago
  OMG dint know that... Thank you sooo freaking much!!!

retro212 14y ago

disclaimer: I work for Bitovi, and I'm a CanJS core comitter Short answer: yes, people do build real apps with these frameworks. I stumbled upon JavaScriptMVC (CanJS was extracted from JMVC) 4 years ago when I was building application with a lot of front end code, I think we had around 10k lines of JavaScript in various modules. Trying to build something like that without a framework was a huge pain, and JMVC helped here a lot. In last few years (after I started working for Bitovi) I worked on pretty big enterprise level applications, and besides being able to build things in cleaner way, a huge plus was ability to allow less experienced developers (from the companies we did consulting for) to implement stuff with familiar structure and without needing to care about memory leaks, zombie events and similar stuff. IMO CanJS is the best framework currently available, but I'm extremely biased. In the end I don't think it matters which framework people choose because they will get a lot of value just by using any of them. That said, I would never again use a DOM-centric approach for frontend apps. Live binding is a huge game changer and data centric apps are (in my experience) less buggy and get stuff done with less code.

porker 14y ago

What would you call "the necessary edges of a modern web app"? I agree that these frameworks don't meet all my web app pain points, but thought I was the only one.

analog 14y ago

There's a list of Backbone examples at http://backbonejs.org/#examples http://backbonejs.org/#examples

gline 14y ago

I'm not totally sure it will have been the right choice in retrospect but it was effectively this blog post: http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html that lead me to prototype using ember. I believe Square's analytics platform - not a "full" web app but a pretty substantial one - is still in production deployment based on ember. Of course, they're probably using whatever version of ember was around 18 months ago, and there have been radical changes since... It feels very likely to me that these javascript frameworks represent a substantial component of the future of this kind of development. People smarter than I am seem to feel that angular is 'better technology' than ember, or at least that in looking like extensible html it has more in common with the eventual future than ember does. I'm actually surprised, in this spate of MVC framework posts, that Meteor hasn't gotten more of a mention. In some ways it's younger than the others, and it has some idiosyncrasies (it doesn't actually require that the client and the serve both be written in javascript but you'd never know if from the web site). But the meteor team is incredibly smart and the company is well financed - and they're spending a lot of time and energy on one of the most interesting aspects of the problem, something ember and angular have not worked out: how to synchronize models and data between the client and the server. Meteor has a special protocol for handling this, such that when deployed properly if the data changes in a database the model in the client automatically updates to reflect this. As someone building a complicated analytical engine with computations done in a python / C++ back-end and structure results visualized in javascript, the idea of being able to reuse models in both places is appealing and the idea that I wouldn't have to spend as much time on data synchronization is almost enough to try to make the switch...

laughfactory 14y ago
I too am a little surprised at how little attention Meteor seems to get. I attribute this to the fact that it sells itself as a client + server technology, rather than a potential client-side only tech (being fed by whatever server you want). When you sell yourself as a client+server then you might have a difficult time attracting the attention of all those who have significant investment in a different back-end, be it Node, Rails, or whatever. But yes, I agree, Meteor looks awesome. It's also got a steep learning curve. And much like Ember or even--I would argue, Angular--it's difficult to see the "magic" right off the bat. And given how new Angular and Ember and Meteor are, there is still a dearth of tutorials, videos, and books to help new comers see the value and get started. So I'm definitely keeping my eye on Meteor. That said, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Ember have something similar? If the data changes in the database then won't Ember update the client to reflect this? I'm not exactly clear on the distinction between Meteor's "Live HTML" and Ember's approach.

evilduck 14y ago

Where are they? Any public examples? http://builtwith.angularjs.org/ http://builtwith.angularjs.org/

rdtsc 14y ago
Not sure if that helps the case or makes it works: Cafe Townsend. A page for a concert. Recipe sharing website. HTML5 Canvas Gradient Creator. Those seems like toy examples one would do that something works, any real/serious public examples?
TallboyOne 14y ago
I always hated that page. It makes angular look like a joke. Ember actually has real sites under it's belt, and I think angular shoots itself in the foot having those novelty 'apps' on there and not a single serious thing. Although, Analytics is built with angular if I'm not mistaken.

numo16 14y ago

Discourse[1] uses Ember for all of its front-end and it seems to work pretty well. [1]: http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/

davecap1 14y ago

I built http://www.5by.com http://www.5by.com on AngularJS in about 3 months, and just a few thousand lines of code. The same thing in Backbone would have likely taken a lot more time and a lot more code. It was my first AngularJS app, and I was learning it on the job, which is why it took that long. Overall, Angular is a joy to work with and its conventions force you to write clean, readable, decoupled code.

romaniv 14y ago
I find it highly annoying that people who promote client-side MVC and one-page apps always claim that it's trivial to make pages linkable and make browser navigation work, yet the wast majority of real-life single-page apps are missing those features.
- manmal 14y ago
  If you use Ember correctly, you get a URL for each application state and can use the back button to your liking. The only downside that I can see here is that after going back, the site might take a while until it has fetched all the data (which is not the case for common web apps). Discourse suffers from that.
- marknutter 14y ago
  That's because it's not generally a requirement for single-page applications. The idea of a single-page app is to make it feel like a desktop application, not to make it highly linkable (which is why it was stupid for Twitter and Gawker to go the single-app route). But yes, it is incredibly trivial to support it using these frameworks.
  - romaniv 14y ago
    That's because it's not generally a requirement Is that a new way of saying "I just don't care about it"? The idea of a single-page app is to make it feel like a desktop application, not to make it highly linkable I've heard that before... from ASP.NET WebForms developers. Incidentally, I've seen quite a few ASP.NET WebForms applications that were literally a single page with changing panels and hidden controls. Needless to say, they were a bloody mess. Thing that normally could be achieved by linking required code changes. Integrations that could be performed via a simple HTTP post were done using complicated web services. Links are the essence of the web platform. Calling something an "app" doesn't change that.

tootie 14y ago

I work for a agency that does pretty substantial projects ($1-10M range) and we've done a fair amount of backbone. Angular has gotten a lot of chatter, but isn't really suitable for our kinds of projects.

rdtsc 14y ago

Same here. Angular is cool it seems for 'look at pictures my dog took on its collar camera' or 'look how small my todo list code is'. Otherwise it is a world of pain fighting with it. Basically once you learn Angular you are an Angular programmer from then on. It has its own terminology and way of doing things, I haven't seen the benefit of going that way. Also looked at its code, founds so much convoluted stuff in that it is a little scary having to run on top of it.

marknutter 14y ago
> Basically once you learn Angular you are an Angular programmer from then on Kind of like "once you learn Rails you are a Rails programmer from then on"? I agree that if you're doing nothing but fight with a framework it's probably not a good choice for you. Correct me if I'm wrong but you sound like someone who isn't a big fan of opinionated frameworks in the first place.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > Correct me if I'm wrong but you sound like someone who isn't a big fan of opinionated frameworks in the first place. I think you are right. I have been burnt by enough frameworks both picked by me or others that promise the world ('really easy, just use this framework! here is an example of a thing X that we did for a demo that kind of looks like something you might want to do'). Then as soon as you do something not anticipated or unimplemented yet in the framework you hit a wall and decelerate from 100 to 0 pretty quickly. I guess a good framework is one that is extensible and straddles the border between a framework and library.
  - marknutter 14y ago
    > I have been burnt by enough frameworks both picked by me or others that promise the world I've definitely been there, too. I think it's one of the risks in using a framework, but like everything you have to weigh the risks against the rewards. > I guess a good framework is one that is extensible and straddles the border between a framework and library. I think Rails did a good job with this. It provides opinionated defaults but allowed people to swap in other libraries as they needed.

marknutter 14y ago

Well, Google used Angular to re-write DoubleClick, so that's a pretty good example of a large scale application using one of these frameworks in the wild. Ember.js is being used in http://www.discourse.org http://www.discourse.org Anecdotally, my team and I are using Angular.js for our mobile offerings of http://kona.com http://kona.com and have been loving it. I'm not sure why it would be any more difficult to build full-fledged web apps with these frameworks than it would be to use vanilla jQuery or Backbone. Our app has become quite complex and we're still loving Angular.js, for instance. And it's not simply about "getting rid of lines of code", it's also about structure and testability. I can honestly say we haven't had to fight with angular yet but who knows what will happen down the line. For now, we're very happy. > Seeing these comparisons I am increasingly getting the impression the discussion is dominated by people procrastinating from their projects Not sure why this barb is necessary..

corresation 14y ago
It wasn't intended as a barb. If anything it was self-reflection, in that I tend to find myself caught up in essentially trivial things when I get caught in procrastination loops. Perhaps I am projecting.
- marknutter 14y ago
  I read it wrong then. At any rate, fwiw I actually think Ember.js and Angular.js help with procrastination. It's far to easy to get muddled in the details of how to organize a backbone.js or vanilla jQuery application; at least for me. Going with Angular.js let me move forward faster than I would have otherwise.
  - just2n 14y ago
    This is a trade-off that manifests downstream. Highly opinionated there-is-one-right-way frameworks make it easy to get started because you don't have choice, but also get in your way in the long run because you don't have choice, and that also tends to limit what you can do.

LaSombra 14y ago

NewsBlur, http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com is using Backbone.js. http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2012/11/13/backbonification-migrating-javascript-to-backbone/ http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2012/11/13/backbonification-migrat... and https://speakerdeck.com/samuelclay/backbonification-migrating-newsblur-from-dom-spaghetti-to-backbone-dot-js https://speakerdeck.com/samuelclay/backbonification-migratin...

varunkho 14y ago

Last time I checked, Udacity was built on angular.

harpb 14y ago

Build with Backbone http://harpb.com/player/showroom/ http://harpb.com/player/showroom/

olegp 14y ago

StartHQ (https://starthq.com https://starthq.com) is a web app directory and launcher. We are very happy with AngularJS, having used Backbone before. If there's enough interest, I could do a blog post about our experiences. We are actually adding the ability to list which technologies any given app uses, so you will soon be able to search for all apps in production using any of the frameworks listed above.

Joeri 14y ago

I've helped build a 100 K line single page app in ExtJS, and I can see the value ember would have for building that app (have not looked much into angular so cannot comment on that one). What you need in large-scale single page apps are coping mechanisms for the DOM (or as I know it: the root of all evil). Stuff like automatic and on-demand rendering of content, automatic cleanup and event listener removal, nested layouting solutions, strong eventing and routing mechanisms, data binding and automatic data loading, and so on. Any framework that helps you with those things by necessity will invent its own pseudo-DSL, and require you to live in its world. The way I see it, it's all a matter of what you're optimizing for. If you expect to run at most 2000 lines of code in a single page, then backbone is excellent for that. If you expect to run at least 20.000 lines of code in a single page, then something like ember or ext is needed. You can build those in backbone ofcourse, but you'll probably end up rebuilding much of the infrastructure the bigger frameworks give you out of the box. Ofcourse, this is separate from the whole debate on whether a pure client-side approach makes sense on that scale. I still think it does, but I think the mixed model is equally valid (different trade-offs in each case). You're right that the mixed model blends poorly with these frameworks.

ulisesrmzroche 14y ago

There's nothing trivial about keeping data reliably in sync in the browser. It's a hard problem, not something that can be solved by writing a few lines of code in Backbone. It's very misleading to just dismiss it like that.

chauzer 14y ago

Betterment.com completely rewrote it's front-end app with backbone from Flex - https://engineering.betterment.com/2013/02/a-better-front-end/ https://engineering.betterment.com/2013/02/a-better-front-en...