Campfire #4 : JavaScript Frameworks, Picking One From Many [Webinar 57min]

On March 21, 2013, Mertech continued the Campfire initiative with a session on JavaScript frameworks. If you missed it, you can watch the video above.

Oliver Nelson (Senior Technologist) led the discussion of the history leading up to the need for JavaScript frameworks. In a nutshell, JavaScript had become the wild, wild West as the web evolved. Frameworks became necessary to automate and streamline different tasks so developers could focus on their application, and to enable more efficient code and cross-browser compatibility.

The presentation then moved on to a detailed discussion of some of the more widely-used frameworks.

• Backbone is popular because it uses key-value binding and is very small (6 kb). Backbone is a good framework to use if you are building from the ground up, but the do-it-yourself nature may require you to add widgets and CSS on your own.

• AngularJS, Google’s solution, is an expressive framework which uses a “declarative” model not a “programmatic” model. With Angular, you can build the UI entirely in HTML. In addition, it has very good support and documentation.

• EmberJS (formerly SproutCore), was used to develop Apple’s MobileMe interface. It enables developers to build HTML on the fly, and execute tasks on the client side that usually have been done in the server. However, Ember does not have its own widget library.

• Dojo is another framework good for large projects. This full framework has cross-browser compatibility, a good smartphone and tablet interface, is extremely lightweight and has great documentation. In addition, it is distinguishable from other frameworks due to the existence of Maquetta, an in-browser development and design studio for developing Dojo GUI’s.

• JQuery is very powerful and well-known. It has a rich plug-in environment encompassing all the widgets in JQueryUI. However it is quite large (32 kb).

• YUI is Yahoo’s open-source product. It is known to have excellent support for effects such as grids, drawing and animation, rich UI controls, and many third-party tie-ins. It also has solid mobile support and a large forum community, however it is heavier than many others and loads slowly.

After going through the key frameworks, Oliver mentioned that TodoMVC.com is a wonderful resource to help developers choose between different frameworks.

Once the discussion opened up for questions, MVC and its variants (e.g. MVVM) were explained in further detail and documentation was stressed as a very important factor when choosing a framework as the books get outdated too quickly. Licensing models (CC, LGPL, & MIT) were also explained.

All in all, it was an informative session, and we look forward to the next one.