[ioda]

At http://www.reportdash.com we use backbone with backbone layout manager and jade. We have been able to design a pretty robust report and dashboard builder with just a single front-end developer.

Never once did I regret the choice, nor has been limited by the choice. I pretty much could implement everything I thought with minimal effort.

I would say backbone with backbone layout manager has the bare minimal abstraction. It just boils down to picking the right pattern. I use a state variable to hold everything related to the dom, and re-render the dom whenever the dom needs to be updated. May not be as fast as 'react', but at least in my case, it is good enough. ( Since my 'views' are nicely factored, I often has to re-render only a small part of the dom)

Without the framework, I would have taken double the time for sure. And boy, the code is nicely organised as well.

I did have some experience in developing spa's using jquery alone. Well, that was in 2009. On any day, I would vouch for Backbone+ Backbone Layout Manger + Jade over simple jquery

I used to wonder why it hasn't been as popular as react or angular.

[bikamonki]

> I used to wonder why it hasn't been as popular as react or angular

Mainly b/c it isn't a framework endorsed by Google/Facebook.

[throwanem]

I've never seen a clean, maintainable implementation based on Backbone. I would like to.