Recently decided to use Backbone as a JSMVC Framework on my team. Although I looked at Ember and Angular, which obviously both have many more features than backbone out of the box, We chose to use Backbone because it seems to have such a large and vibrant community behind it - seems like angular and ember are both lacking in this respect.
However, as our Backbone application grew in complexity, we noticed that Backbone is so bare in terms of functionalities that we had to build our own half-baked framework on top of
it to make up for the gaps.
I think the Backbone project needs to make Backbone's intentional feature sparseness clear. I've come to realize that backbone is more of a library which provides a basis to make a client-side framework rather than a something that can be used standalone by app developers.
If I could go back and change our original choice, I definitely would have gone with one of the Backbone-derived frameworks (chaplin, marionette) or just gone with something more fully-featured like angular. While backbone is beautiful and elegant for small projects, it just doesn't provide much convenience as a stand-alone library for larger applications.
I have found the Angularjs community to be thriving and most helpful. Check out their google group (1), g+ page (2), g+ community (3), irc room (4) and youtube channel (5) for an excellent place to get help. I usually get help as soon as I need it, amazing.
Also I have been impressed with the active community projects AngularStrap (6) and AngularUI (7)
We recently faced a similar decision, and ultimately went with angular - the two-way binding sold it for me, plus the concept of pushing all DOM manipulation into directives (declared in the HTML), to get that out of the controllers. We've spent ~8 weeks using it: our codebase is smaller, easier to mantain/adapt, and better modularized -- we love angular. The docs are great, and the IRC community is there when you hit something quirky.
I always said it, Backbone is not a JSMVC Framework; It's a JSMVC Framework Framework (How to go meta!) Basically, it's a solid foundation to create a JSMVC Framework.
However, as our Backbone application grew in complexity, we noticed that Backbone is so bare in terms of functionalities that we had to build our own half-baked framework on top of it to make up for the gaps.
I think the Backbone project needs to make Backbone's intentional feature sparseness clear. I've come to realize that backbone is more of a library which provides a basis to make a client-side framework rather than a something that can be used standalone by app developers.
If I could go back and change our original choice, I definitely would have gone with one of the Backbone-derived frameworks (chaplin, marionette) or just gone with something more fully-featured like angular. While backbone is beautiful and elegant for small projects, it just doesn't provide much convenience as a stand-alone library for larger applications.