[nogridbag]

I'm moving towards the library approach for some toy projects for both client and server.

There is no perfect framework and by choosing one you're usually stuck with its warts for the long haul. I usually find that I'm bending my code to fit into the framework conventions that I don't necessarily agree with.

With ExtJS for example, the framework conventions dictate your project should be organized into folders like this:

  controllers/
  models/
  views/

...whereas I prefer controllers, models, and views, which are coupled, to be located in the same folder and models which are intended to be shared to be explicitly in a shared folder.

Another example (still ExtJS!) is that I never agreed with ExtJS's MVC implementation - where its controllers were global for all instances of a view. It took Sencha several years before they fixed this by adding "ViewControllers" in ExtJS 5.

If ExtJS was not an all-encompassing framework I would have liked to use its UI components with a different MVC library (or simply vanilla JS) organized into my preferred project structure. I suppose it's still possible to do this but with frameworks you tend to not want to deviate too much from the framework conventions or things start to go wrong.