Ive used backbone marionette for a few apps in production.

I am using Knockout along with RequireJS for an app of mine. I toyed with Angular not so long ago and I like it a lot. I stick with Knockout for the moment because it is the one I know best and I am the most productive with it.

I am not too fond of single-page applications, as business logic tends to creep into the client-side. I believe that this logic should reside on the backend, and frontend used only for presentation and interaction.

What I do is I have separate server-generated pages, with each being very interactive and javascript heavy. However when moving through the app, mostly every page is generated from the server.

If you are not building a SPA (or even if you are), it's worth looking into Knockout before investing in Angular or Ember. It has a smaller learning curve than the more full-featured frameworks. You'd be surprised how much you can do when you combine Knockout for data-binding with jQuery (and/or other libraries) for AJAX and animation.

I loved Knockout. But I found it infuriating to debug and gave up on it.

@psmail What problems did you have to debug with Knockout? I always found everything that I needed in the docs, which is excellent.

@marcofiset - yep, the doc is great. But I found that when Knockout wasn't working correctly it provided not enough feedback as to why. I am sure I'm not alone in this one because some vids I watched on the topic highlighted a debugging issue.

I'm not saying its bad. In saying its great, but debugging drove me a little nuts. Nuts enough not to persevere. I'm happy to accept my own lack of knowledge contributed to this.

Knockout over Angular/Ember any day. Unless you're building a SPA.

@tappleby How does the backbone+marionette in production? Does it work well in doing large apps?

Angular is not just SPA. I use it with Laravel. Angular works well in any type of environment, but because it is a very rich MVC framework it acts just like Laravel with its own route, factory, etc. providers. Granted it is ideally suited for SPA development, because of its compile requirements, but you can work around them. I've not really used Knockout, but I don't know of any full time JS developer that has promoted Knockout over AJS. That sai,d I have zero personal xp so have no opinion.

I am familiar with javascript and jquery but have not yet made the jump to a js framework. I am lead to believe that Angularjs has a nightmare learning curve, but has good documents and tutorials - but I would not personally know.

Question: which framework has the lowest learning curve coupled with great docs / vids ?

I do not need an enterprise strength js framwork as I am an independent. Just need to be able to effectively automate the presentation of data on the page.

Many thanks

@vincej take a look at ReactJS from Facebook. Honestly, at this point a lot of them a very good and battle hardened. The good ones all have a some differentiation. So like everything depends on what you trying to do. If all care about is presentation and simplicity, take a look at ReactJS - I think Facebook has done something interesting and easy to digest. I use AngularJS, but there is a lot of redundancy with Laravel in that they are both MVC architectures, that said the Angular DOM stuff is very powerful.

@marcofiset "I am not too fond of single-page applications, as business logic tends to creep into the client-side. I believe that this logic should reside on the backend, and frontend used only for presentation and interaction."

That's why i created http://www.gothamjs.io :)

Am I the only one using VueJS? I discovered it here on Laracasts and recently began using it in production.

Is it just too new?

@opheliadesign certainly not. I asked this a long time ago, I'm using VueJS nowadays. Both @JeffreyWay and @TaylorOtwell have helped greatly to make VueJS more noticed.

Vue.js is great, but I don't know many people who are developing SPAs with it though. Seems that it's just easier to do server-side rendering, and load your fancy JS on top of it.

@opheliadesign VueJS is not really a popular framework. The only places I've seen it was either mentioned by Taylor and Jeffrey or here on the site. I've never seen a post on one of those JS newsletters or mentioned by any of the JS developers.

That doesn't mean that the framework is bad, it's just that the number of people who can help you is very low so you have to figure it out on your own.

We get a lot of these new JS frameworks trying to fix the problems of the previous one or the most popular ones but then they fail at something else and most of them just die or are not being used by a lot of people.

@Ruffles yeah, unfortunately right now I'm struggling to get help with what should be a trivial validation issue. Overall I've loved working with VueJS but perhaps I should try some of the other options as well.

I am really just looking for the best option for manipulating data in the DOM and keeping code fairly clean. I'm not looking to replace backend stuff with a Javascript framework.

@JohnRivs sorry about that, on mobile it does not show when a post was created.. thought this was a fairly new thread. :)

VueJs is best and easy to learn.