We were lucky to have jashkenas for a talk last week, and one of the questions he answered was how Backbone compares to Angular and Ember.
One of the key differences in philosophy with Angular is that Backbone tries to separate the UI representation from the core logic of your app by focusing on having rich models (alla MVC). Your models should have meaningful domain-related methods, and they should not know at all about the UI at all. Then have the UI observe those models.
In Angular, while it still draws a line between the UI and the rest of your app, there's not much focus on having rich model objects. However you want to represent your data is up to you, as long as you update the properties of $scope to have the views know about it.
Another key difference is the size of the feature set of each framework. While Backbone tries to give you the basic components for building a JS rich app and lets you decide how to solve no-so-basic things, Angular goes for a more full-featured approach.
An obvious example of this is view rendering. Angular provides templates with data-binding, filters, a way to abstract new "components" though directives and probably much more (disclaimer: i'm not an Angular user). In Backbone, on the other hand, the View#render method is empty, up to you to do whatever you want. You might simply use _.template and $.fn.html, or you can use some library to handle the data-binding (e.g. Rivets.js [1]).
This difference in feature coverage also reflects in the code size of the frameworks. You can totally read, and understand, Backbone's whole source code in an afternoon or probably less.
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Personally, i'm not fond of the monolithic approach of Angular. In fact, i'd really love to see Backbone taking an even more minimalistic approach and decomposing its components even further: make the events, models&collections, REST handling, views and routing be separate libraries, and have "Backbone" be just a namespace with these things in it.
It's not that opting-out Backbone's specific features is difficult (it's actually very easy, as there's very little magic to what it does). But, for example, i don't think what Backbone provides for dealing with UI (basically, tracking of the DOM element associated with it and listening to DOM and model events... and a dependency of jQuery) is useful if you're going to use some library for data-binding. So, in that case, i'd prefer to opt-out and not even have Backbone.View lingering around. It'd be awesome to be able to do that by just removing a "backbone-views" dependency from the project.json file hehe.
Anyways, i think it's cool to have some healthy competition on this front of web development; there's still much to be polished.
I think http://chaplinjs.org/ provides a nice happy medium between the two approaches. It extends (does not fork) Backbone objects to solve those no-so-basic things for you. Yet it still keeps the UI as separated from the core logic of your app as much as vanilla Backbone.
Less tediousness than vanilla Backbone and a cleaner separation from UI and core logic than Angular.
Thank you for putting into words what I have failed to whenever someone asks me why I chose Backbone for our app development over Angular. The lighter wait library and MV* ness of it just made more sense over tying so much to the UI.
The opposing philosophies haven't changed - AngularJS really wants you to live in an AngularJS world and is a framework, whereas Backbone is more of a library and can be used to enhance your app (or parts of it) as well as providing structure.
Subjectively, they're both very popular although Angular seems to be growing faster while Backbone has been mature for a while.
If you're comparing them, remember it's apples and oranges - my company used Backbone recently in a mobile app and we loved the flexibility to use the parts that were helpful (Views, Events) without having any enforced application structure. It feels very light-weight but leaves much of the decisions up to the developer (there are frameworks like Marionette that provide more structure if you want it)
On the other hand Angular (or Ember for that matter) is great when you want to use it to drive your entire UI, and makes a lot of sophisticated behaviour easy to set up.
So I'd say they're very different solutions to client-side MV*, and not really competing. You'd use the one that suits your problem and how you want to build your app.
They try and solve the same problem with different levels of abstraction. I've gone full circle from Vanilla JS, to Backbone, to big monolithic frameworks like Ember and Angular and I've come back to Backbone. I think Backbone provides the right level of abstraction for the problems it solves. Angular and Ember I feel create their own problems.
Maybe it's just because I haven't gone full circle yet, but working with Ember I really feel I can focus on the domain issues and creating a great app.
With Backbone -- and the bunch of BB extensions (Marionette etc) you need to be productive with it -- I find myself just maintaining and extending massive amounts of boilerplate code.
Gee, that's an unexpected comment -- how refreshing.
As always, the best thing to do is browse through what's actually been done with them, compare the relative quality of the result, and judge for yourself...
Backbone is so much lighter than these frameworks, it really can't be compared directly. Angular is very popular lately, but you have to do your own research of the available choices and determine which project best fits your needs.
Comments
How is Backbone faring against AngularJS these days ?
We were lucky to have jashkenas for a talk last week, and one of the questions he answered was how Backbone compares to Angular and Ember.
One of the key differences in philosophy with Angular is that Backbone tries to separate the UI representation from the core logic of your app by focusing on having rich models (alla MVC). Your models should have meaningful domain-related methods, and they should not know at all about the UI at all. Then have the UI observe those models.
In Angular, while it still draws a line between the UI and the rest of your app, there's not much focus on having rich model objects. However you want to represent your data is up to you, as long as you update the properties of $scope to have the views know about it.
Another key difference is the size of the feature set of each framework. While Backbone tries to give you the basic components for building a JS rich app and lets you decide how to solve no-so-basic things, Angular goes for a more full-featured approach.
An obvious example of this is view rendering. Angular provides templates with data-binding, filters, a way to abstract new "components" though directives and probably much more (disclaimer: i'm not an Angular user). In Backbone, on the other hand, the View#render method is empty, up to you to do whatever you want. You might simply use _.template and $.fn.html, or you can use some library to handle the data-binding (e.g. Rivets.js [1]).
This difference in feature coverage also reflects in the code size of the frameworks. You can totally read, and understand, Backbone's whole source code in an afternoon or probably less.
----
Personally, i'm not fond of the monolithic approach of Angular. In fact, i'd really love to see Backbone taking an even more minimalistic approach and decomposing its components even further: make the events, models&collections, REST handling, views and routing be separate libraries, and have "Backbone" be just a namespace with these things in it.
It's not that opting-out Backbone's specific features is difficult (it's actually very easy, as there's very little magic to what it does). But, for example, i don't think what Backbone provides for dealing with UI (basically, tracking of the DOM element associated with it and listening to DOM and model events... and a dependency of jQuery) is useful if you're going to use some library for data-binding. So, in that case, i'd prefer to opt-out and not even have Backbone.View lingering around. It'd be awesome to be able to do that by just removing a "backbone-views" dependency from the project.json file hehe.
Anyways, i think it's cool to have some healthy competition on this front of web development; there's still much to be polished.
[1]: http://rivetsjs.com/
I think http://chaplinjs.org/ provides a nice happy medium between the two approaches. It extends (does not fork) Backbone objects to solve those no-so-basic things for you. Yet it still keeps the UI as separated from the core logic of your app as much as vanilla Backbone.
Less tediousness than vanilla Backbone and a cleaner separation from UI and core logic than Angular.
Thank you for putting into words what I have failed to whenever someone asks me why I chose Backbone for our app development over Angular. The lighter wait library and MV* ness of it just made more sense over tying so much to the UI.
The opposing philosophies haven't changed - AngularJS really wants you to live in an AngularJS world and is a framework, whereas Backbone is more of a library and can be used to enhance your app (or parts of it) as well as providing structure.
Subjectively, they're both very popular although Angular seems to be growing faster while Backbone has been mature for a while.
If you're comparing them, remember it's apples and oranges - my company used Backbone recently in a mobile app and we loved the flexibility to use the parts that were helpful (Views, Events) without having any enforced application structure. It feels very light-weight but leaves much of the decisions up to the developer (there are frameworks like Marionette that provide more structure if you want it)
On the other hand Angular (or Ember for that matter) is great when you want to use it to drive your entire UI, and makes a lot of sophisticated behaviour easy to set up.
So I'd say they're very different solutions to client-side MV*, and not really competing. You'd use the one that suits your problem and how you want to build your app.
They try and solve the same problem with different levels of abstraction. I've gone full circle from Vanilla JS, to Backbone, to big monolithic frameworks like Ember and Angular and I've come back to Backbone. I think Backbone provides the right level of abstraction for the problems it solves. Angular and Ember I feel create their own problems.
Maybe it's just because I haven't gone full circle yet, but working with Ember I really feel I can focus on the domain issues and creating a great app.
With Backbone -- and the bunch of BB extensions (Marionette etc) you need to be productive with it -- I find myself just maintaining and extending massive amounts of boilerplate code.
Gee, that's an unexpected comment -- how refreshing.
As always, the best thing to do is browse through what's actually been done with them, compare the relative quality of the result, and judge for yourself...
http://backbonejs.org/#examples
http://builtwith.angularjs.org
Backbone is so much lighter than these frameworks, it really can't be compared directly. Angular is very popular lately, but you have to do your own research of the available choices and determine which project best fits your needs.
"angular or backbone: what are startups using" (blog post and poll)
https://blog.backlift.com/entry/front-end-frameworks
or ember.js?