There are a staggering number of JavaScript Tools, Frameworks and Libraries these days. It’s hard to know what to use.
We’re developing a JavaScript mobile web application (we’ll write more about this) and we needed to decide what to use.
Here’s what we’ve gone with:
- Backbone
- Handlebars
- jQuery
- Modernizr
- Moment
- Underscore
- Waypoints
- Lots of custom code (in many small distinct files)
We’re also using SASS for styles and compile this to CSS.
The reason for this is we are trying not to use one monolithic framework but picking the best libraries to do each job really well. For example, we are only using Backbone to do the URL routing (Underscore is a dependency). We hope this will allow us to swap parts out when we want rather than being locked into a certain way of doing things.
Keeping everything small and separate is great for development but for production we bundle it all up for performance and version it for cache busting. You can see an early version of our work here:
