Trying to find out what JS frameworks people <i>actually</i> use to build web applications rather than what people talk about ;)<p>By frameworks, I'm referring to things like Angular, Dojo, etc. If in doubt, mention it.<p>I'd also love to hear about what people think of the ones they've used.<p>I'll collate all this together and report back :)
Surprised it has not been mentioned but almost everything I build not matter the higher level framework, starts with require.js. Require alone goes a long way to cleaning up code structure and overall architecture. I like Dojo for really big corporate apps where I am basically replacing a desktop app with a web based equivalent. It's popularity has faded in the past few years which is a shame, because it and Ext are really the only two frameworks around that are targeting enterprise apps.<p>For consumers facing stuff I generally use a combination of Backbone, jQuery, underscore and some other libs added in as needed. That is probably the most common stack you will see out there.
jquery.<p>fancy frameworks introduce complexity, bloat, bunch of magic that works behind the scenes.
for small stuff you don't care about it might be nice, for anything serious i would run my own code.
angular.js<p>This series of quotes from a dev I work with captures a common visceral experience of working with angular.js for the first time:
"I've never been so frustrated with code before"
..an hour later..
"You stare at something broken for 20mins, then the fix occurs to you and the truth of it is just so beautiful."
We switched from backbone.js to angular.js about 8 months ago, and the team is generally very happy.