I was responsible for maintaining a large backbone app over the course of 10 years.
The main thing to know about Backbone is it’s not intended to be a fully fledged framework like React.
It’s more like jQuery in the sense that it has utility, but in order to use it in a way that is easy to maintain over time, you need build your own layer of abstraction on top of Backbone to make things work the way you want.
React has a lot more of that built-in, and the downside is React is more opinionated with a “right” way to do things, while Backbone leaves a lot up for the developer to decide how to do. I guess this could be a benefit of react depending on how you look at it, or whether you want an opinionated framework.
All that said, I will always love Backbone for being the only open source framework that has source code that is actually possible to fully read and fully understand in a few hours in an afternoon.
The source code is surprisingly simple and easy to understand. There’s very little magic going on behind the scenes.
> The main thing to know about Backbone is it’s not intended to be a fully fledged framework like React.
Neither is React. The built-in state management was meant for concerns relevant to only that component, not your entire app's state - people just realized it worked well enough.
People weren't just using this as a migration path, before Rudux became the clear winner of that early React era people would reach for this combination (though possibly not with that specific library, I don't remember the details about using them together).
The main thing to know about Backbone is it’s not intended to be a fully fledged framework like React.
It’s more like jQuery in the sense that it has utility, but in order to use it in a way that is easy to maintain over time, you need build your own layer of abstraction on top of Backbone to make things work the way you want.
React has a lot more of that built-in, and the downside is React is more opinionated with a “right” way to do things, while Backbone leaves a lot up for the developer to decide how to do. I guess this could be a benefit of react depending on how you look at it, or whether you want an opinionated framework.
All that said, I will always love Backbone for being the only open source framework that has source code that is actually possible to fully read and fully understand in a few hours in an afternoon.
The source code is surprisingly simple and easy to understand. There’s very little magic going on behind the scenes.