Backbone.js vs Electron

Overview

Backbone.js

Stacks7.5K

Followers3.5K

Votes675

GitHub Stars28.1K

Forks5.3K

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

Backbone.js vs Electron: What are the differences?

Backbone.js: Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events. Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface; Electron: Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub. With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Backbone.js and Electron are primarily classified as "Javascript MVC Frameworks" and "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" tools respectively.

"Javascript structure" is the top reason why over 136 developers like Backbone.js, while over 50 developers mention "Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" as the leading cause for choosing Electron.

Backbone.js and Electron are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Backbone.js with 27.5K GitHub stars and 5.72K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Backbone.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1066 company stacks & 213 developers stacks; compared to Electron, which is listed in 213 company stacks and 366 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Backbone.js	Electron
Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.	With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.
-	Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 7.5K	Stacks 11.6K
Followers 3.5K	Followers 10.0K
Votes 675	Votes 148
Pros & Cons
Pros 135 Javascript structure 101 Models 98 Simple 76 Restful 59 Easy api Cons 1 Requires underscore.js	Pros 69 Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications 53 Open source 14 Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code 8 Because it's cross platform 4 Use Node.js in the Main Process Cons 19 Uses a lot of memory 8 User experience never as good as a native app 4 No proper documentation 4 Does not native 1 Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs

What are some alternatives to Backbone.js, Electron?

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Mithril

Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

Marionette

It is a JavaScript library with a RESTful JSON interface and is based on the Model–view–presenter application design paradigm. Backbone is known for being lightweight, as its only hard dependency is on one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, plus jQuery for use of the full library.

Ampersand.js

We <3 Backbone.js at &yet. It’s brilliantly simple and solves many common problems in developing clientside applications. But we missed the focused simplicity of tiny modules in node-land. We wanted something similar in style and philosophy, but that fully embraced tiny modules, npm, and browserify. Ampersand.js is a well-defined approach to combining (get it?) a series of intentionally tiny modules.

Durandal

Durandal is a cross-device, cross-platform client framework written in JS and designed to make Single Page Applications (SPAs) easy to create and maintain.

Sciter

It brings a stack of web technologies to desktop UI development. Web designers, and developers, can reuse their experience and expertise in creating modern looking desktop applications.