Backbone

Hi all,

I was wondering why Backbone was chosen as the frontend framework over any other framework (especially Angular) ?

Thanks

Topic

[Alexandr SmagaParticipant]

Hi.

As I remember when we was choosing it angular hadn’t stable version.
Pros of Backbone:

• Has bigger community and age(stability as well)
• It’s simple and flexible and requires only a few minutes to get started
• It does not provide strict rules, but in the same time it helps to organize code

Also want to highlight that together with requireJS we got modular code and some kind of dependency injection.

There are cons as well, but we did not know about them when it was chosen ;)
Now we are investigating integration with chaplinJS, and trying to figure out it’s pros and cons.

[XimousseParticipant]

Thank you for your swift response! it confirms what I was thinking.

Whatever you decide about chaplinJS, I’d be curious (and might not be the only one) to know the results of your findings when you’re done.

[Dima SorokaKeymaster]

hi guys

This is very hot topic right now for us and i would like to share more details with you and hear some feedback.

As Alexandr mentioned, the main reason why we didn’t use Angular JS at the beginning is a level of adoption. On other hand backbone is not a full stack application framework and leaves developers with too much flexibility on the way to implement feature and as a result you may see different approaches in different OroPlatform bundles.

We did a few proof of concept implementations with Chaplin JS and marionette and decided to use Chaplin as application framework as it solves main architectural issues that we were facing.

In parallel we are doing deep analyze on SPA approach with Angular JS and here are main challenges:

• Strong JS skills as a requirement to OroPlatform developer. – Moving away from well known and adopted in PHP world server side view generation is a big step and we not sure how community will respond to this.
• Dual application development. – To be honest, such approach leads us to two applications which should have same level of modularity, flexibility and extensibility. We see a lot of pros and cons in this.

This is not an easy chaise and it has global impact so any feedback very welcome. Thanks!

[Author]

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