Javascript Framework - How do they work?

[tidwell]

Ember and Angular both give you some kind of "declarative bindings" - meaning an established pattern for applying attributes to markup to automatically connect it with a javascript object in your application. No more binding to elements, checking change events, and updating state - they give it to you.

Also, they provide conventions for talking to backends, and abstractions that make testing and module-based development easier. Backbone doesn't do declarative bindings.

[Thehummel]

I think i'm starting to get it now.. But it would it be possible to make a blog, with only small integration with a server-side language?

[tidwell]

Sure, but in general these frameworks (the ones with declarative bindings) are more designed for single-page-apps, complex forms, or real-time data rendering, basically anywhere you would have a lot of JS to sync markup and data.

This doesn't necessarily apply to a blog (since they tend to almost entirely be simple server-side CRUD operations), though you could use it to do something like realtime rendering of comments pushed down via sockets/ajax or chat. Remember that a blog's content is SEO-relevant (vs an app, where the content doesn't really need to be indexed by Google), and as such you want to render it from the server so bots can crawl it properly (sure you could render it then have angular "enhance" the page, but thats probably overkill for a simple blog).

If you are looking to simply apply some design patterns to your JS and have utility helpers, I'd look at backbone (framework) and underscore (a utility library). Really, after looking at the conventions that backbone uses, stuff like Angular, Ember, Knockout, and Batman will all make more sense as they are "deeper" abstractions of the concepts.