[cmdkeen]

In my (albeit limited) experience with Angular the level of complexity is much greater than say using something like Knockout for data binding only. Not everyone wants to build an SPA and make use of $http. Also not everyone is currently hacking together jQuery. There never seems to be community chat, or posts, from people who have migrated from another framework/library to Angular, it's always people mashing together jQuery who are held up as the target audience. That should really tell you something...

[sanderjd]

Data point: I moved from a relatively big Backbone project (utilizing some of the higher-level libraries that inevitably were built on top of it) to a bigger Angular project. I liked Backbone more, because it is simpler to reason about and much easier to debug, but I believe we build things much faster with Angular. I decry a lot of the same design in Angular that others do, but I can't argue with its productivity.

I think the productivity for me comes from two places: 1. Emphasis on isolated and reusable view components. You can certainly do this in Backbone, but I never felt like I had a satisfying pattern for it. 2. Automatic data binding in the "push" direction. That is, the direction of updating the view based on changes. I think the full bidirectional binding complicates things. I find that I have far more sinks for changes than sources, so being explicit at the sources would not be burdensome.

From my initial reading tinkering, using something like ReactJS as the view layer in a Backbone (or perhaps even plain JS) app may very well speak to both of those points.