PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 16 - Mithril

Ah, I so want to love Mithril! The guy that created it, Leo Horie, is one geek I can understand. The way he presents Mithril on the home page of the project speaks to my heart.

Mithril is around 5kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 15 - KnockoutJS

The main site for Knockout, knockoutjs.com, is a fantastic resource. Maybe it errs a teensy bit on the garish side, but it’s more informative (and exciting with that information) than any of the other sites on here.

I highlighted the outstandingly easy and comprehensive tutorials before. The structure is the same as that of other tutorials on jsFiddle, but it looks better and is more… structured.

Let’s look at the main claims on the home page. Knockout has:

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 14 - jQUery

What can be said about jQuery that sounds even remotely interesting? The whole world is using this framework, by far the oldest in our list.

jQuery started small. The most famous “thing” about it is the dollar sign, $. It’s what popularized the framework, as it made selection of elements in an HTML page extremely easy.

It’s not that it was hard before, but the W3C spec for HTML and DOM is a terrifying mess of incoherence. Let’s just look at selectors.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 13 - Durandal

Durandal is very opinionated. It has a clear idea on how to structure your application, what best practices there are, and how you should go about your business. Instead of promising flexibility, speed, and safety, it tries to entice you with “Comfortable, Feature-rich, and Versatile!“

it’s comfortable because it follows the conventions of other frameworks (and makes them requirements) like jQuery or Knockout. It’s feature rich because it follows different conventions, so that you can go whichever way you like. And it’s versatile because you can write apps for phones, for desktop, for anything.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 12 - CanJS

Maybe it’s because I was so overwhelmed by the dozen files that made the previous combination tick, but I was ready to kiss CanJS when I saw the directory tree contained a grand total of four files. Yes, I know, four large files are not better than a dozen small ones, but it seemed that an application as simple as this Todo list shouldn’t need such granularity.

The CanJS homepage is a hoot. You can go to the download button, and instead of just sending a giant file your way, it asks you what kind of templates you’d like and what modules you’d like to include. Then it gives you the option to minify the download. So you get exactly what you’d use in production.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 11 - Backbone

The odd thing about our Backbone/Marionette/Require implementation is the sheer number of Javascript files that litter its directory structure. There are 6 view files alone – one for the ActiveCount, one for the CompletedCount, one for the Header and one for the Footer, and one each for the the TodoItem and one for the list. There are four templates, a router, a controller, a file for the collections, and one for the mode, plus an app and a main Javascript files, and one that defines the templates used.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 10 - AngularJS

AngularJS is a Google product. As with many things coming out of that company, it can be a little prejudiced and quirky. It also has to live with the fact the company has about a dozen Javascript frameworks running around, so it’s never clear which one is going to get most love.

What is special about Angular is that it tries to live within the confines of the HTML, giantly souped up. In particular, elements in the DOM are tagged with Angular attributes (all starting with the prefix “ng”). The Angular runtime then goes in and magically does things with those attributes.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 9 - Ampersand

Our alphabetically first contender has been around less than a year. Less than a half year, in fact, but it has already garnered quite a lot of attention.

There is a company behind it, &yet (read: and yet). They make development tools, so they say, so one would think Ampersand is their core offering. Unsurprisingly, they put a lot of weight and passion behind it.

The introduction to the framework says:

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 8 - Documentation

What good is it to you if everybody loves a super-zippy framework if you can’t learn how to use it?

We know a few things about the remaining contenders:

• They are not slow (efficient)
• They don’t require a novel to bring a button to the screen (concise)
• They have people interested in them (active)

The next step would be to go into each Todo example and learn how each framework handles the task. But before i go into that, let’s do one last elimination round. Let’s look at the amount and quality of documentation and tutorial resources for each framework.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 7 - Activity

One of the big problems with technology is the rapid pace of change. It’s good for users, of course, but it can be a real challenge for developers. That’s not because it’s hard to learn new technology, but because you may end up creating something in a framework that becomes a dead-end. Then, as the Internet moves on, you have to switch your app to a different framework if you want to make use of new technology.