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Created October 7, 2015 03:30
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Angular vs Backbone vs React vs Ember notes
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comparison.md

Note: these are pretty rough notes I made for my team on the fly as I was reading through some pages. Some could be mildly inaccurate but hopefully not terribly so. I might resort to convenient fiction & simplification sometimes.

My top contenders, mostly based on popularity / community etc:

  • Angular
  • Backbone
  • React
  • Ember

Mostly about MVC (or derivatives, MVP / MVVM).

  • A way of cleanly separating data, presenting data, and business logic (e.g. “To get the total exports of a country, you must sum its exports with every individual country”). Following definitions differ slightly depending on which interpretation you’re using, but the gist is similar.
    • Model: Provider of data - could be an API. Could be a javascript object. Could be anything. It’s the “state” of the application, anything from the data in your viz to which buttons are current clicked and whether we’re showing exports or imports.
    • Controller: Sits between everything and decides how to process the user input, where to gather data from, what to do with it, etc.
    • View: e.g. templating - how the application actually looks to the user and where the user interacts with the application.
  • Why? e.g.

Some terminology:

  • Two way data binding
    • I change something in the view (UI), the model (state data) changes automatically. I change the model, the view changes automatically. See: http://n12v.com/2-way-data-binding/ especially the angular example is pretty concise. Saves a lot of time and reduces bullshit boilerplate code.
  • Dependency injection
    • A technique where the framework loads modules automatically for you. So let’s say your app needs a NetworkGraphVisualization and that one requires a D3Visualization and a SliderWidget, which in turn requires JQuery, a dependency injection framework will initialize all that junk for you. This also encourages separation of concerns.
  • Routing: Being able to index a specific view in the app with a specific URL and having the URL change with the app state.
  • Templates: You define the structure of HTML and provide slots, then you can plug in any data you want. Can be generated from a string with templating code in it or by writing html-like DOM stuff - handlebars is the former and Angular directives is the latter.

My impressions:

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