- Perfect for complex "client-side" application, where the complexity is more in the way "components" of an app interacts with each other than in the way they sync and or interact with a backend.
- Very clean separation of concerns
- Uses concepts that kind of look likes the future of HTML/DOM (DOM templates, binding attributes…).
- A bit complicated to grasp. A lot of new concepts.
- jQuery or another dom parsing framework in directives may be painful to use (need more tests) because of the way angular compiles templates (see http://egghead.io/video/angularjs-angularelement/).
- Still under heavy development, some stuff changes a lot in the master version (but 1.0 can get you started)
- Some common things are still unavailable (you can't show or hide a view with an animation like fadeIn / fadeOut).
Good for application with a big level of complexity on the client side, but you'll need to learn A LOT of new stuff.
- Very easy to start with.
- Very small.
- Can be used with any external library.
- Documentation is good (it's easier to document a small project)
- It does just a few thing to help you create a good structure for you app, but you still have to do much of the work ! (even simple things like cleaning events binded to a view when you remove the view).
- If you add other components on top of it (Marionette, Chaplin, Thorax), the learning curve increases ( but not that much and code complexity decreases).
Good for small and simple applications and easy to understand.
- Convention over configuration, you can get a lot of thing working with just a few lines of code ! (see https://peepcode.com/products/emberjs)
- EmberData looks perfect for syncing data between your app and a server api and/or localStocalStorage (especially if your server code follows a few convention, Restful routes…)
- I do trust Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale work a lot !
- Still under heavy development, some stuff changes a lot (especially for EmberData).
- You're forced to use the Handlebars template engine (but it's a good one so not really a big con)
- Documentation is getting better every day but still far from perfect.
Good for applications where you need to deal with syncing data with server and/or save it offline. Looks like a good fit between Backbone and Angular but still young…
Just stumbled upon this. Maybe a bit late, but I think the performance is also a significant factor to take into account.
Speed of rendering, and size.
Which gives :
Backbone: Super light, but strong dependencies with JQuery & Underscore (~50ko I think). Precompiled templates are possibles, so really fast, but the whole view needs to be rendered on model change.
AngularJS: Relatively heavy (80ko), lesser need on JQuery but easier with it (which will bring it to 110ko). Data-biding enables to render only the part of view binded to the updated model, but the dirty-checking system is painfully slow when the page has a lot of bindings.
Ember: Not tested, I think the templating performance is halfway between Backbone & Angular, because it allows precompiled templates, but the whole framework is over 250ko ! (EmberJS: 180ko, Ember data: 70ko, Handlebar runtime: 10k).