4 Mins Read  April 7, 2015  Cuelogic

Backbone, Ember & AngularJS are the paradigm shift for Web Application Development

Backbone, Ember & AngularJS are the paradigm shift for web application development

With JavaScript popularity moving up, client side applications are getting much more complex than before. Developers use JavaScript for lots of different Web applications, because it can really make the user’s side look and work in a pleasing manner.

Frameworks like Backbone, Ember and Angular bring structure to JavaScript code and keep it organized. They are all open source, so they’re constantly being improved by the community. They also save you time because they are each built on top of , a powerful library that makes some of JavaScript’s tricker operations easier to perform and more readable that will ease the job of the developer

In this post we will take a closer look at three more advanced and popular frameworks: Backbone.js, Ember.js and AngularJS

Backbone.js:

This tool provides a lot of facility, such as models with key value binding and custom events, API of enumerable functions, views, and other useful rich APIs that help to create a modern applications.

Backbone represents data as models which can be created, validated, destroyed, and saved to the server. Views are used to display the model’s state and can be triggered when a property has changed. The Views can then respond accordingly or re-render with the new information. Backbone is an attempt to lay down a minimal set of data-structuring and user interface primitives that are generally useful when building web applications with JavaScript.

If you are working on a single-page application or widget and you are comfortable with being a self starter Backbone is likely the lightweight framework for you.

It is depend on one JavaScript library instead of several. As a result, Backbone is extremely lightweight, which means it’s good for building fast and responsive applications, but it’s most effective if those web applications are themselves small and single-page, or better yet, only part of a page, like many of the music applications using Backbone right now.

Many well known and favored app use the Backbone framework, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Also worth noting is that a number of music applications were built with Backbone, such as Soundcloud, Pitchfork, and Pandora.

Ember.js:

Ember.js is another popular JavaScript framework for developing amazing web applications. Its API helps to finish project quickly. It feels like Backbone on steroids, it has a similar feel, but is a lot more powerful and structured.

It’s easy to see when any app is using Ember because of its loading speed. Ember and Angular are really close to each other, so if you know Ember better than Angular and you don’t have a reason to switch, don’t. Because the one detriment you’re going to have is the learning curve, and that’s for any project or framework.

Ember comes with a lot of built-in support for standard code features can do almost all that Angular can and equally fast or faster, and it manages to achieve that without deviating so much from classic JavaScript syntaxes and patterns. It looks quite a lot like Backbone, but where Backbone is either loose or lacking features; Ember has it covered and enforces best practice.

Ember’s library size and support network are its two greatest strengths, but if you are only trying to create a small widget or single-page app, it might be overstated for you. If you are working on a multipage, navigational, long-term project, Ember might be your choice.

LivingSocial, Groupon, Zendesk, Discourse, and Square are some of the most well known applications that have adopted Ember.

Angular.js:

AngularJS is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks that extend HTML vocabulary for your application. This is a toolset for building the framework most suited to your angularjs development. This presents a familiar behave to others libraries. And it is the closest thing to a real software engineering solution for front-end web development. It is also possible to integrate AngularJs with ROR. Thus, we can leverage the potential of both the frameworks.

If you are starting from scratch, Angular is the best recommendation. It is the way to go because it’s taking off. It will remain that way unless problems arise from the roadmap, within the community, the project, or the development. It might happen, since Angular is getting a little more complicated, but right now it’s hot to get.

It can do quite a lot of amazing stuff, like 2-way bindings, helpful out of the box directives and filters. Angular also has quite nice support for module dependencies and injections; it has services and factories which become reusable parts for your app. It also enforces quite strongly separation between logic and presentation which allows you to make UI presentation variants quickly while the underlying logic remains the same. We can also integrate visuals with angular. Hence, it allows to create interactive data visualizations.

Some of the most popular companies that credit AngularJS as the JavaScript framework include Google and Nike. The Angular and Ember communities are pretty big as well. Also lots of tutorial and activity in StackOverflow and IRC, but not as much as Backbone.

It may be difficult to learn and may require you to structure your code in a particular way but once you get the hang of things, you can be very productive with it. 

This is how we suggest?

It would be wrongful to say that one is better than the other, because all above three frameworks has its uncommon set of advantages and disadvantages. They all have a very much alike objective to make the process of app development faster. The best preference of the right framework depends to a large extent on the kind of app you are trying to develop and your personal.

>> If you do not like too much control and are looking for a framework that offers easy REST API data access plus routing, go for Backbone. Be prepared to write a lot of boilerplate code, though.

>> If you are looking for a framework that seeks to rival native applications and reduce the amount of time and code it takes to write a web app with, go for Ember. Be prepared for a lot of initial roadblocks in terms of learning.

>> If you can handle a slightly steep learning curve and are looking for a mature Javascript framework that is complete in itself, go for Angular.

Choosing the right framework is an important decision when building a web application. From a unbiased developers view, it’s very obvious that different applications and different needs make each framework shine its brighter.

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