I’ve been using Backbone.js in a couple of projects now and my feelings about it are quite diverse. On the one hand, I like how it provides you with guidelines on how to structure your frontend code. Although splitting model and view is a very basic idea in software development, it also is very powerful. Backbone.js is of great help by providing collections which aggregate model instances and by being able to sync these models with a server via RESTful APIs. On the other hand, it always (and I hope that it’s not just me) seems to be a pain in the b*** to figure out the best way to implement a proper view lifecycle and to keep track of all registered event handlers. If you aren’t careful when removing or even just re-rendering views, you can seriously mess up event handling and prevent proper garbage collection. If you are just a little sloppy, this leads to a slow frontend with an always increasing memory footprint.
I’m not saying that Backbone.js is bad in handling UI events, just that you have to care about too many things that are common to most web applications. This article describes an alternative to the Backbone.View component.

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