I should restate: if someone started with backbone on a project, there's no reason to pull it out and restart with ember. It has its advantages for a certain type of project and a certain type of developer today.
If you like minimal frameworks, like to make your own design decisions and want to build your own framework on top of a library, backbone is great.
If you are just looking for a minimal subset of MVC because you're doing some high-concept app that doesn't fit into the standard web application paradigm, it's worth looking at backbone.
Most importantly, if you're retrofitting an existing application, backbone will be invaluable for years.
The ideas behind it are solid and relevant today and it's not a bad idea to use it. I just believe that if you are starting a web application today, for 95% of the use cases, you are better off sticking with jQuery or moving to Ember, Knockout or Angular.
That isn't to disparage any of the other libraries and frameworks, though.
> for 95% of the use cases, you are better off sticking with jQuery or ...
This is terrible advice. If you can't tell the difference between a procedural app full of jQuery callbacks and a an app modularized with Backbone objects, then I don't think you have had real experience writing apps with either of these libraries.
It depends. Are you doing single page apps? jQuery is awful advice. Are you doing internal 2007-style internal apps with only a small amount of interaction? I'd argue jQuery is a cost-effective way to get a project out.
I haven't figured out how to get a team who is "barely" conversant in javascript productive in an MVC framework just yet, myself.
If you like minimal frameworks, like to make your own design decisions and want to build your own framework on top of a library, backbone is great.
If you are just looking for a minimal subset of MVC because you're doing some high-concept app that doesn't fit into the standard web application paradigm, it's worth looking at backbone.
Most importantly, if you're retrofitting an existing application, backbone will be invaluable for years.
The ideas behind it are solid and relevant today and it's not a bad idea to use it. I just believe that if you are starting a web application today, for 95% of the use cases, you are better off sticking with jQuery or moving to Ember, Knockout or Angular.
That isn't to disparage any of the other libraries and frameworks, though.