IMHO Good Thing is to have set of libraries and not a framework at all. Start with handcrafting all HTML,CSS with interactions you need. You HTML skeleton will

IMHO Good Thing is to have set of libraries and not a framework at all. Start with handcrafting all HTML,CSS with interactions you need. You HTML skeleton will depend greatly on what you want to achieve - like when one page changes to other and theres a ajax call between - where you put the wait screen: as separate, on old page, then wait, transit to new at once, then wait and so on. If that is done you know broadly what you need. Example configuration may be React for rendering, cherry picked Model (or State) from Ampersand, Backbone Events Standalone for event bus. Something for History/routes too, can't recommend anything specific because my projects did not had one (yes, you can build web-app without back button support). This way if something better comes up, you can switch, if something is abandoned, gets your way, you can switch. Or you can rewrite it in-house fairly easily. I imagine that when you discover that React is too much, too heavy, too bloaty (for example, i'm not saying, that it is, we are happy React users now), then preserving all API calls and replacing it with few lines of Mustache templates is doable. Not trivial, but doable.