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Add to SafariWhen comparing Ractive.js vs Blocks.js, the Slant community recommends Ractive.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript libraries for building a UI?” Ractive.js is ranked 7th while Blocks.js is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Ractive.js is:
Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports a true templating language
Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages.
Pro Makes it possible to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion
Ractive has a concept of proxy events, which translate a user action (e.g. a mouseclick) defined via an event directive into an intention (e.g. 'select this option'). This allows you to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion.on-click='activate'
with arguments:on-click = 'activate: {{a}}, {{b}}'
It's activate (and not click, nor your function name) that is the name of the handler event that will be fired for any registered handlers created viaractive.on('activate', your_handler)ractive.on('activate', your_another_handler)
Of course, Ractive also supports method calls like on-click='toggle(foo)'
Pro Two-way binding configuration
Two-way binding can be turned off by those that are concerned it may be a source of bugs.
Pro Step by step tutorial
They have a great interactive tutorial which makes the learning process easy peasy. You will get into it within a couple of minutes.
Pro Virtual DOM
Instead of relying on the DOM, Ractive implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.
Pro Small footprint
Blocks.js is just 16.5KB minified and gzipped. So it's pretty small.
Pro Modular structure
Apps developed with blocks.js are modular in structure and make use of reusable objects. This makes these applications very maintainable.
Cons
Con Ractive's two way binding can be a source of bugs
Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Ractive model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed.
This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code.
However, this is the default behaviour which can be changed to have one-way data binding.
Con Relatively new
Blocks.js is a relatively new library. It doesn't have much support and there re not many people who use it. So if you run into any problems it would be hard to get solutions.
