[stevensanderson]

Would that be considered negative? In any case, KO is not a Microsoft project, and only one of the core team members (me) works for MS.

Anyway, many projects are built with KO, and its 3500+ watchers on GitHub suggests it's something like 7 times as widely used as one of the libraries in the article, so it's perhaps inaccurate to say that nobody considers it!

[WickyNilliams]

I don't think it is, but others might. I've often sung KO's praises but it always seems fall to the wayside.

Personally I think KO would greatly benefit from more architectural guidance (as i mentioned above). You're left on your own architecturally and structurally, with little guidance or higher level constructs to assist. This is much like backbone, but with backbone there is a lot of guidance out there, and even frameworks built atop of it (e.g. Marionette) which aim to instil best practices.

Things I'd like to see, which might quell other's trepidation:

* A large-scale demo app, with a detailed run-through of the how's and why's

* A guide to unit testing ko apps

* Drop IE6 (maybe even IE7?!) support to make it super lightweight. It's never going to be backbone lightweight, but imagine being able to say the tiniest front-end framework with no dependencies - that's a powerful message

[porker]

Best practices and a large-scale app would be awesome!

The people in the IRC channel are very helpful (and will happily tell a cleaner way to do it than the KO examples on their website), but to have all this written up would be excellent.

[WickyNilliams]

Thanks for the tip about the IRC channel, didn't realise there was one out there. I assume it's on freenode?

But for most, hitting up an IRC channel is a barrier to entry they just won't have the enthusiasm to overcome. Such advice should be front and center, easy to access, up to date and canonical.

[porker]

Freenode indeed :)

[Lazare]

Knockouts documentation is fantastic, but geared at a very novice level. The lack of any guidance on unit testing is a particular frustration.

[WickyNilliams]

I agree. The documenation is awesome. Concise, accurate and not confusing (i'm looking at you angular). And the interactive online tutorial is the icing on the cake. I posit that a complete beginner could get up and running with KO within a few hours.

But again, for non-beginners, I'd like to see more in-depth stuff.

[andysinclair]

In some circles it would be considered negative.

For example, I have spent most of my career using Microsoft developer tools building LOB applications. I think the MS dev toolset is great.

At one point I was involved in building a consumer web app and attended various "startup" community events. I would start chatting to people (generally Rails/PHP devs) and as soon as I mentioned I was building a web app using MS tech they would look at me as if I was mad. Sometimes they would even make excuses to stop chatting and find somebody else to talk to - I concluded from this that there is definitely some anti MS feeling within the startup community.

Anyway, this has gone off topic, but thought it was worth mentioning. BTW, one of my colleagues has just started using Knockout and thinks it is great!