Why Consider Backbone.js?

Why Consider Backbone.js?

Backbone provides a minimal set of data-structuring (Models, Collections) and user interface (Views, URLs) primitives that are helpful when building dynamic applications using JavaScript. It’s not opinionated, meaning you have the freedom and flexibility to build the best experience for your web application how you see fit. You can either use the prescribed architecture it offers out of the box or extend it to meet your requirements.

The library doesn’t focus on widgets or replacing the way you structure objects - it just supplies you with utilities for manipulating and querying data in your application. It also doesn’t prescribe a specific template engine - while you are free to use the Micro-templating offered by Underscore.js (one of its dependencies), views can bind to HTML constructed using your templating solution of choice.

Looking at the large number of applications built with Backbone, it’s clear that it scales well. Backbone also works quite well with other libraries, meaning you can embed Backbone widgets in an application written with AngularJS, use it with TypeScript, or just use an individual class (like Models) as a data backer for simpler apps.

There are no performance drawbacks to using Backbone to structure your application. It avoids run loops, two-way binding, and constant polling of your data structures for updates and tries to keep things simple where possible. That said, should you wish to go against the grain, you can of course implement such things on top of it. Backbone won’t stop you.

With a vibrant community of plugin and extension authors, there’s a likelihood that if you’re looking to achieve some behavior Backbone is lacking, a complementary project exists that works well with it. This is made simpler by Backbone offering literate documentation of its source code, allowing anyone an opportunity to easily understand what is going on behind the scenes.

Having been refined over two and a half years of development, Backbone is a mature library that will continue to offer a minimalist solution for building better web applications. I regularly use it and hope that you find it as useful an addition to your toolbelt as I have.