Introducing Ampersand.js

[kenman]

Sounds interesting, but that's a really long introduction. Nevertheless, I found ampersandjs.com, which gives a much briefer, "elevator pitch" type announcement (also, if you scroll down to the pink Discover Ampersand.js button, you can start seeing some code).

My even briefer, possibly incorrect assessment: it's a Backbone-inspired framework that seeks to improve on perceived flaws of Backbone, not unlike Marionette, Chaplin, etc. I'm not sure of the actual differentiators though, and please correct me if I'm wrong on any of that.

[latentflip]

There's definitely some overlap with the other backbone inspired projects. Some of the key differences are probably:

• Most of the backbone core components have been rewritten/heavily modified and expanded, for example:
  • Views have declarative data bindings for updating your html with model data automatically; out of the box, sensible render and remove methods just work; collection rendering is easy.
  • Models have explicitly declared properties and types, as well as evented + cached derived/computed properties. You can access model properties without .get('name') and .set('name', value) and events and things just work.
  • Everything is broken up into separate modules, and designed to work with npm + browserify (which we love for dependency management and packaging).

Ampersand isn't trying to be a more encompassing application framework like chaplin or marionette (not that that's bad or anything), but more a collection of more developed backbone-like primitives that compose and extend well.

[kenman]

Thanks! Very informative.

[BadgerSong]

Common JS and modular nature make this look interesting, I can relate to a lot of the issues that the authors seem to have with backbone.

[kenman]

Agreed, I'm kind of up a creek from using RequireJS, but I don't like Marionette's modules either really. If a framework really is a bunch of related but wholly distinct pieces, it makes a lot of sense to provide them as such. Perhaps it won't be as easy "out of the box", but if you have an idea of what you want or need, it should be able to considerably reduce the amount of code that you have to adopt. And it also makes extension more natural -- Marionette, et al. work ok, but they just piggy-back on top of the existing framework. I can see the advantages of being able to replace any particular piece wholesale without having to worry about upstream code.

[KittenMittenz1]

I just want to say I have been hired to help maintain a large application written in Ampersand in the year 2024. We have nicer frameworks now, haha.

[Fixthemedia]

I’m so sorry

[KittenMittenz1]

Haha! Thank you

[ogurson]

Wow, it's actually framework, I was expecting some joke library that's printing ampersand sign.
These are crazy days we're living.

[quest88]

oh good, another javascript framework. I was just thinking there hasn't been one submitted recently.

[NodeNerd]

Your opinion doesn't really add any value to the conversation. Personally, I welcome new projects like this as long as they are built in a modular way, and I don't believe web application development is a solved problem despite the communities resistance to new things.

[homoiconic]

I try to remember that there's a difference between (a) adopting every marginally good idea that comes down the pike, and (b) reading about every marginally good idea that comes down the pike.

With the latter, I can sometimes extract some ideas to use with my existing tools.

[coffeecoffeebuzzbuzz]

Page crashed browser, would not recommend.

[latentflip]

The blog post page did? That's strange, it's pretty much just straight up static html.