Question

I was looking for information comparing Ember.js and Backbone.js for use with a Ruby on Rails backend. Does anyone have experience working with both of these client side frameworks and would be willing provide some insight around them?

Answer 1

Both are great, and you can’t make a bad choice imho.

There is a good thread on this subject on Quora, with an answer from one on the Ember.js author, Yehuda Katz: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences-between-Ember-js-formerly-SproutCore-2-0-and-Backbone-js

A quote from the thread (Austin Bales)

A lot of the differences between the two come down to this: SC2/Ember have made a few decisions in advance about the tools and workflows you’ll use. Backbone has very few opinions on matters of templating, rendering, hierarchy, and KVO/Binding – in Backbone there’s almost always “More Than One Way To Do It” and almost never a predefined way. In contrast, Ember provides a little more infrastructure and default options out of the box.

The fact that Ember.js is opinionated is probably a good thing in the long run I’d say. It’s kind of the same philosophy as rails where they often make choices for you.

I actually have to make this choice at work as well. I tried working a little bit with both, and I have to say, I feel more confortable with Backbone, but it’s really not a well informed opinion 😉

ps: check this out: http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/

It’s a todo app implemented with all the popular frameworks. It could help you compare the two.

---

edit: Since I wrote this answer, I’ve been trying to learn Ember, and I’m really liking it. Here is an AWESOME blog about ember, everything is very well explained, clear, in depth: http://darthdeus.github.com/.

Ideally, you would master both, as I feel that they have different use cases now.