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Angular 2 vs Backbone.js: What are the differences?

Angular 2: One framework. Mobile & desktop. Angular is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications; Backbone.js: Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events. Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Angular 2 and Backbone.js can be categorized as "Javascript MVC Frameworks" tools.

"It's a powerful framework" is the primary reason why developers consider Angular 2 over the competitors, whereas "Javascript structure" was stated as the key factor in picking Backbone.js.

Angular 2 and Backbone.js are both open source tools. Angular 2 with 49.5K GitHub stars and 13.5K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Backbone.js with 27.5K GitHub stars and 5.7K GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, Pinterest, and reddit are some of the popular companies that use Backbone.js, whereas Angular 2 is used by AgoraPulse, WePay, and Edools. Backbone.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1066 company stacks & 217 developers stacks; compared to Angular 2, which is listed in 259 company stacks and 237 developer stacks.

Decisions about Angular and Backbone.js
Dennis Ziolkowski
Migrated
from
AngularJSAngularJS
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AngularAngular

I was first sceptical about using Angular over AngularJS. That's because AngularJS was so easy to integrate in existing websites. But building apps from scratch with Angular is so much easier. Of course, you have to build and boilerplate them first, but after that - you save a ton of time. Also it's very cozy to write code in TypeScript.

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Julius alvarado

It is a complete waste of time and life to learn a different framework to solve the same problem (Both AngularJS and Angular build A+ UI's, but both require a lot of time to learn). It's dumb to spend 200 hours learning AngularJS, then 200 hours learning Angular when you could spend 200 hours learning AngularJS and 200 hours learning how to solve a different problem (like AI/ML, Data Science, AR/VR, Digital Marketing, etc.)

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Kyle Harrison
Web Application Developer at Fortinet · | 2 upvotes · 46.7K views

When deciding on a front end framework to build my bitcoin faucet project, I knew I needed something battle hardened, dependedable, but also feature filled and ready to go out of the box.

While I've written some smaller apps with ng2+, I've never gone full tilt with it so I knew there were still some things to learn, and most importantly: how to do them properly, such as proper component architecture and breaking old habbits from ng1.

I didn't opt for React in this case, simply due to the need to stack more and more things on top of it to do what I'd need it to do. I wanted a framework that was going to take over routing and execution of complex UI controls, and keep items outside of a component's scope updated and react to events. This framework needed a comprehensive event emission system, data acquisition and handling, bi-directional data binding, state, and a series of things that you'd need to install separately for React to match up to what's already in the box with Angular.

I opted to stick to Angular instead of Vue for the fact that Angular also already has it's entire build system ready to go and comprehensivly built to deliver the tiniest version of it's deliverable. I was hosting this thing in a google cloud instance, so I needed to make sure the app stayed as small as possible, and could automatically trim out the cruft. This is where Angular's built in Tree Shaking took precedence for me.

Vue is more than capable of handling everything I'd need, and it was something I took serious considerion of. For instance, Vue poweres Cointiply, another bitcoin faucet application that's highly reactive and high componentized just like I wanted.

But I'd still need to learn Vue, I'd still need to configure it's build system, and I still wanted to use SCSS and TypeScript.

So Angular it was. ng8 is a great platform for building very complex user interfaces, and has many of the problems you'd inevitably face integrating a user interface to an application already figured out, and complete with a best practice recommendation.

React and Vue, given enough time and energy, are super capable platforms. No one can deny that. Angular's "A-Z Batteries Included" approach to the whole development process is what made it especially enticing this time.

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Pros of Angular
Pros of Backbone.js
  • 109
    It's a powerful framework
  • 53
    Straight-forward architecture
  • 48
    TypeScript
  • 45
    Great UI and Business Logic separation
  • 40
    Powerful, maintainable, fast
  • 39
    Amazing CLI
  • 33
    Great mvc
  • 29
    Powerfull Dependency Injection
  • 19
    Easy to build
  • 16
    All in one Framework
  • 15
    Opinionated, batteries-included approach
  • 11
    Schematics
  • 10
    Solid Standard Setup.
  • 8
    Structured
  • 7
    Performance
  • 5
    Complex
  • 4
    Only for single page applications
  • 3
    Builders
  • 2
    RxJS
  • 2
    Ng upgrade
  • 1
    React
  • 135
    Javascript structure
  • 101
    Models
  • 98
    Simple
  • 76
    Restful
  • 59
    Easy api
  • 46
    Flexible
  • 45
    Open source
  • 44
    Fast to pick up
  • 34
    Events
  • 25
    JSON
  • 8
    OOP
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Collections
  • 1
    Easy customizable

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Cons of Angular
Cons of Backbone.js
  • 9
    Overcomplicated
  • 9
    Large overhead in file size and initialization time
  • 2
    Ugly code
  • 2
    CLI not open to other test and linting tools
  • 1
    Requires underscore.js

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What is Angular?

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

What is Backbone.js?

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

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What are some alternatives to Angular and Backbone.js?
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
Polymer
Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.
Aurelia
Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.
Vue.js
It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.
Meteor
A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.
See all alternatives