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It depends on the project's complexity, and also on how many generations of developers have dogpiled horrible kludges onto the original code base. For simple a

by glimcat 13y ago

It depends on the project's complexity, and also on how many generations of developers have dogpiled horrible kludges onto the original code base. For simple apps, it doesn't matter much. Do what gets you in front of users soonest. For more complex apps with a lot of client-side state, you may quickly find yourself outside of jQuery's intended use case. Note that simple apps often become much more complex under ongoing development. What creates problems is trying to pile on a lot of questionable commits without enough structure or organization, and trying to shoehorn it into use cases which it's really not appropriate for. In practice, these situations occur much more often than people anticipate.

notastartup 13y ago
do you think that it's better to rewrite the jQuery app with a framework like Backbone.js once it reaches an increased level of complexity and developers or should it be built from scratch with Backbone.js or a framework like Ember.js or JavascriptMVC in the beginning? It seems awfully slower than just cranking something out in jQuery but I will admit that something like JavascriptMVC looks rather nice. Ideally I would like to avoid having to hunt down jQuery libraries by using one of these frameworks. For example, I am already relying on the following libraries: LAB.js (because I discovered some edge case where things don't load in order) Cookie.js Mustache.js JSON3.js These are rather great for displaying JSON data in a template with jQuery but I had to actively look for these things.
- glimcat 13y ago
  If you're going to be building or maintaining apps in JavaScript, it's absolutely worth your time to learn tools like Backbone, Angular, Ember, or something else in that vein. If you're more concerned with building a business, the optimization criteria are different. Your priority should be building the business - or at least building enough of the business that you can start acquiring customers and pitching to investors. That gets you runway, market leverage, knowledge of what you should be building to acquire and keep customers. You can worry about implementation details like tech stack after the business exists. Worrying about it before you know the business is even valid is premature optimization. You are orders of magnitude more likely to fail because you don't start than because you chose the "wrong" tools.

by glimcat 13y ago

notastartup 13y ago

do you think that it's better to rewrite the jQuery app with a framework like Backbone.js once it reaches an increased level of complexity and developers or should it be built from scratch with Backbone.js or a framework like Ember.js or JavascriptMVC in the beginning? It seems awfully slower than just cranking something out in jQuery but I will admit that something like JavascriptMVC looks rather nice. Ideally I would like to avoid having to hunt down jQuery libraries by using one of these frameworks. For example, I am already relying on the following libraries: LAB.js (because I discovered some edge case where things don't load in order) Cookie.js Mustache.js JSON3.js These are rather great for displaying JSON data in a template with jQuery but I had to actively look for these things.

glimcat 13y ago
If you're going to be building or maintaining apps in JavaScript, it's absolutely worth your time to learn tools like Backbone, Angular, Ember, or something else in that vein. If you're more concerned with building a business, the optimization criteria are different. Your priority should be building the business - or at least building enough of the business that you can start acquiring customers and pitching to investors. That gets you runway, market leverage, knowledge of what you should be building to acquire and keep customers. You can worry about implementation details like tech stack after the business exists. Worrying about it before you know the business is even valid is premature optimization. You are orders of magnitude more likely to fail because you don't start than because you chose the "wrong" tools.