The last of dummy posts

Much has been said about MV* frameworks for SPAs. It’s a tough choice, but I’d say that the top three are Backbone.js, Ember and AngularJS. All three are very well regarded. But which is best for you?

Unfortunately, I must admit that I have limited experience with AngularJS, so I’ll leave it out of the discussion. Now, Ember and Backbone.js represent two different ways of attacking the same problem. Backbone.js is minimal and offers just enough for you to create a simple SPA. Ember, on the other hand, is a complete and professional framework for creating SPAs. It has more bells and whistles, but also a steeper learning curve. (You can read more about Ember.js here.)

Depending on the size of your application, the decision could be as easy as looking at the “features used” to “features available” ratio, which will give you a big hint. Styling is a challenge as well, but again, we can count on frameworks to bail us out. For CSS, Twitter Bootstrap is a good choice because it offers a complete set of styles that are both ready to use out of the box and easy to customize.

Bootstrap was created in the LESS language, and it’s open source, so we can modify it if need be. It comes with a ton of UX controls that are well documented. Plus, a customization model enables you to create your own. It is definitely the right tool for the job.

Finally, we should define some best practices, as well as mention how to implement and maintain them. Typically, my solution centers on several tools, which themselves are based on Node.js.

These tools enable you to improve your development process by applying test-driven development (TDD) or behavior-driven development (BDD), creating the infrastructure to organize your unit tests and a runner to automatically run them.

Plenty of unit test frameworks exist for JavaScript. Why use Mocha? The short answer is that it’s flexible and complete. The long answer is that it has two important features (interfaces and reporters) and one significant absence (assertions). Allow me to explain: