![]() Backbone.Relationalīackbone.Relational is another “stable” library. This is a great library, but it hasn’t been immune to the wider issues in the ecosystem. Marionette still is seeing plenty of work, but as the contributors have cycled through, work on a long awaited version 3 with important improvements has sat on a branch for over a year. I’ve contributed code to Marionette, and have written about it many times on this blog. Of all the graphs here, this one is the nearest and dearest to me. Backbone isn’t getting the activity it used to, but there’s still a steady flow of bug fixes and documentation updates, and issues are being worked through. I’m starting with Backbone itself to give an idea what a stable mature project graph looks like. Last Release: 3 days ago (March 3rd 2016) This is simply an honest look at where the Backbone ecosystem stands, with the goal of helping those of us who are building Backbone applications or considering using it to evaluate the ecosystem honestly. Open source is a volunteer effort, and maintaining a project is hard and often doesn’t make sense when the author has moved on to other challenges. To be clear, I’m not posting this as a criticism of anyone. That lead to a list of 24 projects below. ![]() I built a list of libraries based on the projects that the bower registry returns for the backbone keyword, looking for projects with at least 400 github stars 3. To investigate my perception of this, I decided to look at the contribution graphs of popular Backbone libraries to see the trends over the last 2 years. That does not appear to be the case for many of the other libraries in the Backbone ecosystem. While Backbone’s core has stabilized, it still has a team of maintainers who are actively managing the project. This has the advantage of leaving Backbone as by far the most stable major JavaScript framework, but hinders efforts to pull in lessons from other frameworks 2.įinally, whether as a result of the first 2 items or due to some other factor, the ecosystem around Backbone has crumbled. Secondly, Backbone’s author, Jeremy Ashkenas made a decision to call Backbone “finished” in terms of API and feature set after the 1.0 release. I believe that this chart more accurately reflects usage trends. js that way, and it undersold the other libraries, especially Angular. Update: I’ve changed the above graph from an original that used angular.js, backbone.js, ember.js, and react.js as the search terms. Google Trends gives a pretty good idea of how that has turned out. Angular and React have benefited from significant marketing and financial support for a core development team that have helped them grow quickly. First, React has taken off, while Angular and Ember have continued to grow and learn from React and each other. At the time, Backbone would have been a very defensible choice as a library for starting a new web development, as a simpler and more stable alternative to AngularJS, the current “hot” framework. There were Backbone specific plugins for many tasks, and generally gaps could be filled using the jQuery plugin ecosystem, or a framework agnostic library. ![]() Marionette had emerged as a de-facto standard for web applications 1. ![]() The core library had reached 1.0 the previous year and had a strong team around it. In February 2014, the Backbone community was in a fairly good place. Herding Lions Subscribe Articles Micro Blog About Me Currently Readingīen McCormick The Sad State of the Backbone Ecosystemįor the past 2 years, ~90% of my coding time has been spent working on a large scale Backbone.js app. The Sad State of the Backbone Ecosystem - Herding Lions
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