Backbone vs Ember

A lightweight view class is provided but there is no default templating method implemented. Because views are minimal it allows for much more freedom to implement views however you would like, and because of this freedom it's possible to write views to more uniquely adapt to a problem.

User interactions are done within an events object that allows these interactions to be segregated from the rest of the view code which makes the behavioral aspect of the view easier to read and manage.

Backbone can be combined with any library of your choosing, giving you the ultimate flexibility in creating customized solutions for unique projects. Even the only two backbone requirements, jQuery and underscore can be replaced with equivalent libraries like zepto or lo-dash.

Backbone has existed longer than most frameworks, and has a large following of users and projects using it as a framework.

Backbone collections and models are extended by underscore.js method allowing you to call underscore methods directly on the Backbone objects.

Backbone provides Model and Collection classes that provide strong analogs to restful resources. These strong analogs allow you to interface more naturally with the API, and makes it easier to write custom behaviors for more complicated API interactions.

Collections provide a variety of powerful manipulation methods that are integrated from the underscore library, that allow you to manipulate, sort, and filter collection data easily.

Because all the state is managed by Models and Controllers, and they are extendable objects, you can isolate all the state logic onto those objects allowing the rest of the application to not worry about it. The app is simplified to just taking in input to modify the Models and Controllers, and updating the views to reflect them, but none of the state needs to be a concern outside of the Model and Controller classes.

There is no “magic” happening below the surface: the source code is clear, readable and well commented. Backbone is also “lightweight” in the sense that it doesn’t require a ton of buy-in to use. It can be easily integrated into an existing page, and you can choose to only use certain components of the library (Views without Models or Collections, for example). While there are many frameworks that seem to be faster to get started with, Backbone’s lack of surprises, clear documentation, speed & flexibility make it a good fit for all types of apps.

Because Backbone is so simple, and the different components are very well isolated, it is very easy to extend the functionality of Backbone. If you're writing your own extended code it's easy to keep it separated out, and share with the community.

The community also has many plugins already available, which you can pick and choose to use to fit your programming style.

All Backbone classes extend an events class that allows for listening and triggering functionality. Because all classes implement events by default it is easier to provide asynchronous communication between objects, and it allows better abstraction of interaction so the event emitting object does not need to know the structure or existence of the receiving object.

Ember already defines the general application structure and organization for you. This was done to prevent developers from making mistakes which would needlessly over-complicate their application. While it's still possible to go out of these practices forced to developers by the Ember authors, you still have to go out of your way to force them.

Ember-CLI is a very useful tool. With just a couple of commands it scaffolds the code, installs dependencies and finally compiles everything itself. It's very useful to quickstart an Ember project.

Ember's preferred templating language is Handlebars. This is mainly because Handlebars is a logic-less templating language and Ember tries to keep it's logic outside the view.

Another reason why Ember benefits from Handlebars is mostly aesthetic as Handlebar's clean syntax makes for easier to read and understand templates.

Finally, Handlebars templates are compiled instead of interpreted, which means that they are much faster to load.

Ember follows the philosophy of "convention over configuration" meaning that it already has almost everything configured for you, so you just have to start coding and developing your project right away.

Ember is practically a complete full-stack front-end framework. It comes with it's own asset pipeline, router, services etc...

The Ember Guides are well structured and very well written. The API documentation is also fantastic.

Most of Ember's components come from the Ember Object Model. It's the basis for views, controllers, models and even the framework itself. This means that the framework is extremely consistent since almost every component shares the same core functionalities and properties since they are all derived from the same object.

Route handlers for the URLs can see a wide range of possible application states, asynchronous logic in the router makes sure of Promises. And implementing makes sense.

It batches bindings and DOM updates to increase performance; if similar tasks are added to a batch, the browser would only need to process them in one single go, as compared to re-computing for each task one at a time.

Ember's API are really easy to understand and work with. It has methods which allow you to harness complicated functionalities in an easy to understand way.

Ember's new router need much less boilerplate code that it previously did.

Ember also has a debugging tool called Ember Inspector which is used for debugging the client side of your app.

You can use any of jQuery’s features.

EmberJS provides with an extremely handy feature of advanced bindings. With this you can not only set the path to the binding value in your app but also set in which direction you want the changes to propagate to (oneway, single, multiple etc).

Promises represent an eventual state in asynchronous logic. Having promises everywhere (almost) means you could write simple and modular code, using almost any API that Ember provides.

Having custom properties in your templates is itself a huge plus but having custom computed properties is an even greater benefit, since now you can code your custom function as a property and call it from your template. Hence rendering your page exactly according to your needs.

Ember comes with built-in routing capabilities. There's no need to install third-party plugins to be able to use routes.

If you've used handlebars (Ember.js's templating is powered by HandleBars) helper tags in your code (like {{#each}}) you won't have to worry about updating your template each time you add/remove data from your page, Handlebars will auto update your template for you.