I moved our team from Backbone to Angular almost 6 years ago. I treasured BB on the fact that the entire source code can be read and understood by a junior developer, which made it appealing to me from an adoption perspective in our org, because there was no “magic” to it and a developer inherently understands and accepts that BB solves a real problem in a direct way. Having an army of jQuery devs who still wrote their own XmlHttpRequest functions and handled the inverted IE event bubbling by hand, I needed to ease them into thinking about front-ends as applications.
But my sensibilities as a software developer led me to adopt TypeScript and a kitchen-sink framework as a more stringent way of composing pages rather than just having a Wild West of filling patterns around what BB didn’t offer out of the box. After doing side-by-side comparisons Angular seemed like the most “similar” to what BB looks like day-to-day. I don’t have anything against React/Vue they’re fine.
We are on NG20 now and it’s looking good. I don’t miss BB, we still have some old pages that use it but overall I am not going to get caught up on this code golf stuff. Eventually when browsers catch up and offer out of the box solutions maybe that will be a point where we can go back to implementing things in a simple more native way.
But my sensibilities as a software developer led me to adopt TypeScript and a kitchen-sink framework as a more stringent way of composing pages rather than just having a Wild West of filling patterns around what BB didn’t offer out of the box. After doing side-by-side comparisons Angular seemed like the most “similar” to what BB looks like day-to-day. I don’t have anything against React/Vue they’re fine.
We are on NG20 now and it’s looking good. I don’t miss BB, we still have some old pages that use it but overall I am not going to get caught up on this code golf stuff. Eventually when browsers catch up and offer out of the box solutions maybe that will be a point where we can go back to implementing things in a simple more native way.