It depends on the scale of the project. If what you want to do can be done with 200 or 300 lines of JavaScript using jQuery, then fine. Go for it! But I've see

It depends on the scale of the project. If what you want to do can be done with 200 or 300 lines of JavaScript using jQuery, then fine. Go for it! But I've seen codebases with over 10,000 lines of JavaScript, using only jQuery, and it isn't a pleasant sight. You either end up writing your own ad-hoc framework to add structure, or, more likely, you end up with a bug-ridden, unmaintainable mess where you're writing basically the same code over and over. A framework like Ember or Angular provides structure and takes out a lot of the grunt work of making a large, single-page app.