JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

If you’re following the latest trends in the web development world, you might have noticed that the last years the popularity of JavaScript increased a lot. Lots of frameworks became popular like Google’sAngularJS, ember.js and of course Backbone.js.

One of the first of these “big” frameworks was Backbone.js. JavaScript code before that time was usually unstructured, contained a lot of spaghetti code and was hard to maintain.
Backbone.js gave you the possibility to follow the MVC (Model-view-controller) design paradigm, or in their case, MVP (Model-view-presenter).

Backbone.js gave you the possibility to divide your application in logical parts andprovided data binding. Only that wasn’t enough of course, because applications needed more components like:
* A module system
* Templating
* Data binding
* Data synchronisation
* Widgets
* Testing framework

And so, other frameworks were born, like: RequireJS, CommonJS, Component, AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap, Flight, Hogan.js, QUnit, Jasmine, … (and I can probably go on for another hour).

We will develop a client application that will run on web browsers, so we need to decide what tools and/or frameworks we will use.

For the base stack we don't really have much of a choice: The layout will be done in HTML, styling will be done in CSS and scripting in Javascript. No surprises here. While there are other choices, these guarantee that most modern browsers will run our application.

But these technologies alone would make for a rough development experience. For example, while Javascript and CSS work in all browsers, implementations differ, many times in subtle or obscure ways. There are three areas in which we would benefit from higher level cross-browser frameworks:

* Presentation and styling* REST request management* Templates and event handling

Let's review each and evaluate what options there are.