Productivity Versus Performance: Fighting The Good Fight - CodeBrief. If you've been following the Javascript MVC landscape lately, you might have noticed a growing tension between Backbone.js and Ember.js.
Being championed by Jeremy Ashkenas and Yehuda Katz respectively, both frameworks reside in decidely different camps. Ember.js favors deep abstraction and sensible defaults, whereas Backbone.js embraces the micro-framework mentality of providing a minimalist set of features whilst encouraging integration with a wide variety of other frameworks. The most recent evolution of the debate, however, has resided around performance. An animation benchmark comparing the two frameworks was posted on Hacker News yesterday. Despite being a contrived example, the results of the benchmark are undisputable: Backbone.js is significantly faster than Ember.js - and by a visible margin. Of course Ember.js could be optimized and the gap in the benchmark could be narrowed, but that is moot. There are two things going on here: Second, slow is relative.
Backbone and Ember. Ember and Backbone are both promising JavaScript frameworks but have completely different philosophies.
In this post, I'll compare the two, both from a practical and philosophical perspective. I'll defer to real world experience with Backbone and SproutCore (Ember's predecessor), as well as basic experiments with Ember (full disclosure: haven't built a large Ember app yet). I'll also supplement claims with quotes from a fantastic conversation from Freenode #documentcloud on February 3rd, 2011. For quote context, wycats is Yehuda Katz, one of the lead developers on Ember, and jashkenas is Jeremy Ashkenas, one of the lead developers on Backbone. Before I go into too much detail, it's pretty clear that both frameworks have the same goal: to help developers build apps. 1:09 PM wycats backbone apps are apps So we have a roughly apples-to-apples comparison.
Backbone at a glance Backbone is a minimalist framework that builds on top of ideas from jQuery to give some structure to web applications. EmberJS: Initial Impressions (Compared To Backbone) Hey!
This article references a pre-release version of Ember.js. Now that Ember.js has reached a 1.0 API the code samples below are no longer correct and the expressed opinions may no longer be accurate. Just keep that in mind when reading this. I hope to have time to dig in to Ember.js again in the near future, and will write an updated article if/when that happens! It’s been a little less than a year since I dove heard-first in to Backbone. Backbone.js | Framework. Ember.js | Framework. What are the key differences between Ember.js (formerly SproutCore 2.0) and Backbone.js. Backbone.js or Ember.js? - Arguments for and against. Backbone Events vs. Ember Bindings: A Benchmark.