[super-serial]

Even backbone isn't worth the added complexity IMO.

All these frameworks make you write more code than needed... and because people started to feel it wasn't worth it, their latest pitch focuses on speed. They say the "virtual DOM" is the future, and if you're not diffing your state to re-render the DOM you're not a serious developer.

I still don't see the benefit. I've written 15k lines of javascript code in some apps. My components have state and I re-render as needed, and as long as you separate code between components it's fine.

How many times have you been using a js app and thought "wow this DOM is slow?" You don't. It's either 0.1 sec or 0.2 sec to re-render the whole component/widget. 99.9% of the time a website is slow because the server requests take too long. Every once in a while you'll see some crazy CSS3 animations that make things unresponsive.

The people who go on about having a virtual DOM run benchmarks on thousands of elements... I don't know about you, but I'm never rendering thousands of elements at a time. Ajax/pagination works fine for extra data. I did write a very simple template system and event management system... but I'd rather do that than add the complexity of a framework. Dealing with a framework to make things work in "the X way" is wasting everyone's time. And then the next Angular or whatever comes along... and everyone wastes more time learning the latest version. This has turned into a rant... but I just want to say I'm happy as a coder who avoids frameworks at all costs. At the same time I try to use as many libraries as possible. Libraries save time, frameworks waste time.

[baddox]

Everything you say about DOM performance is decidedly not true on mobile.

[curiously]

I often feel like Javascript frameworks is dominated by 'experts' claiming how the proper way to write Javascript apps is now to share their opinions.

I've yet to run into any problem that were supposed to happen using jQuery and vanilla Javascript.

Even outside of Javascript, I stay away from using full blown frameworks. Even libraries that you think will be perfect for your use case turns out to be a drainage of resource learning, and now being bent to the will of the author's opinions. For example, Celery is a complete piece of shit. The amount of bug, and workarounds that one must experience vs. writing something on your own using RabbitMQ or even just redis, it's clear to me. Same with giant PHP frameworks or RoR vs. Flask. Even microframeworks that focus on not being a framework comes with the some opportunity cost, however being better than the monolithic frameworks that whines and decides to leave you in the dark because you did not share the same opinions.