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by catshirt 4160 days ago
i'm confused by this. the reason for creating an entire framework is you didn't like the jQuery dependency?

replacing jQuery with MooTools in Backbone seems trivial, especially with respect to creating a whole new framework. you'd just need to override a small handful of methods.

all the other problems Composer solves that Backbone excludes (like filtered collections) are supplemented by other third party libraries. i'm not one of those "another framework?" guys- but it seems like you had a great opportunity to make the landscape more robust, instead of further segregating it.
1 comments
orthecreedence 4160 days ago
From what I remember at the time (keep in mind, this is ~3.5 years ago), backbone had a few issues (and bugs) that were making it difficult for us to use on an app we were building.

We could have spent a good amount of time forking, fixing them, hopefully getting a PR merged (if the changes were even in-line with the project), and on top of that creating an adapter to replace any sort of DOM manipulation with Moo, which I think back then was more then just overriding a handful of methods.

So, composer was born not just out of "jquery sucks, we're redoing this" but more "well, we could fix all the stuff that we don't like in backbone, or build something that suits our needs directly."

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krebby 4160 days ago
I admittedly haven't taken an in-depth look over the framework, but what specifically did you feel was missing from Backbone? Anything we can improve?

I don't find this list [0] to be particularly helpful. It looks like the main addition is filtered collections and relations, which there are many ways of doing [1] or pretty easily added via a plugin.

(And as an aside, Backbone absolutely does support IE6, and goes out of its way to maintain bc, particularly in History).

[0] http://lyonbros.github.io/composer.js/pages/comparison [1] http://backbonejs.org/#FAQ-nested

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catshirt 4160 days ago
gotchya. i don't mean to sound accusatory- i am just being selfish. there are bits and pieces of Composer that i'd like to see in Backbone proper. but, the thought of leaving Backbone for something a lot like Backbone is scary.
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orthecreedence 4160 days ago
You did not come off as accusatory, and these are good questions to ask. I also understand the hesitation in trying it out. Do keep it in mind though if you ever have a toy project and a few hours...you might like it!
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