Especially considerring Knockout Model plugin that basically adds Backbone-style capabilities to KO models. Other notable plugins give easy bindings for jQuery UI widgets, Underscore support for collections and external templates:
My favorite are control flow bindings that let you write templating code right inside your HTML and not withing script tags. When you have to write markup inside a script tag you editor might get the whole autocompletion, formatting and syntax coloring wrong. And in past it was relly annoying for me. So having templates in HTML, not in script is really great.
One thing that helps a lot is that all bindings are defined inside data-attributes which keeps markup valid. Most editors support them well, too. Ember's double-braced template attributes are really weak choice in this regard.
And if you're worried about javascript bits inside data-bind attributes you now have an option to separate them via binding providers (see blog post above). The syntax is somewhat clunky but still workable and I suppose it can be improved.
Provided that Knockout has a vibrant community and growing support inside .NET world I think Ember has nothing to offer to make me switch.
And that's unfortunate. Today I see like most frameworks converges to some common ground. Knockout gets more features from Backbone. Backbone gets more features from Knockout (there's at least one bindings plugin for BB although it pales in comparison to Ko). And as far as I can see we as a JavaScript community reached the next base.
- We started with simple Ajax libraries.
- Then we moved to widgets.
- Now we got MVP frameworks and think more about organizing our applications in general.
What's the next step? That's the most important question for me and for other JS professionals that I talked to at recent local conference. When I saw Yahuda's announcement I really hoped that he'd give us a clue. Instead we got another MVP variant and not a top one although a pretty solid.
I suspect that Ember still will get some users. Yahuda has dedicated fans (me included) and Knockout as something coming from .NET world has a somewhat hard time getting adoption among the general JS crowd. Maybe that's a good thing: two frameworks are very similar and can learn from one another. But I personally hoped for more.
Still, congrats on releasing the thing! Keep it up!
> What's the next step? That's the most important question for me and for other JS professionals that I talked to at recent local conference.
Components with bindings IS the next step. Douglas Adams quote:
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question, 'How can we eat?' The second by the question, 'Why do we eat?' And the third by the question, 'Where shall we do lunch?'"
Whenever the topic of web app development has come up in the past 5 years or so, I always think of this quote. In the case of front end development, the questions are "Can we do this?" (CGI, asp/jsp/php), "Can we make this feel better?" (ajax, rails & co), and "How shall we structure our app?" (components, binding, widgets). This last phase only kicked of in earnest about a year ago and I'm still evangelizing the approach to even relatively up to date developers. They've heard of Backbone, for example, but haven't investigated and don't know how it applies to day to day work.
Going forward, expect to see interoperability concerns addressed. I've seen proposals for this in the form of html5 component model [1][2] and style tag's scoped attribute [3]. This provides a common ground for people to mix different libraries/components on the same page with a reasonable confidence that things won't break.
I also expect one of the KVO frameworks and it's associated widget system to "win" like jQuery has won DOM manipulation. What makes widget frameworks in the browser fun is that people have an expectation of being able to completely restyle everything and the only way I know of to do that cleanly without forcing a lot of fragile markup is with sass/less/stylus, so I expect to see those increase in popularity.
As a whole, web apps have been less sophisticated than equivalent complexity desktop and mobile apps. I've long believed that much of this is due to us re-writing a half-assed widget system from scratch for every project. This consumes a significant fraction of the time/money/effort allocated to a project which apps on other platforms can put into additional capabilities or polish. As such, I think the wide adoption of a KVO framework and widget library will be an inflection point for the quality and sophistication of apps in the browser. I'm looking forward to it.
