chaplin

Modules are evil in my experience, they have many disadvantages, much more than the writer points to. When I looked up for some wrapper to Backbone I came across ChaplinJS: https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin/ and it was nice, but using the module system was a nightmare. It was so painful, that I forked it and remove the module system from the code (which was a pain, but still less painful than handling the module system). the fork is here: https://github.com/snird/Mildred and I use it in production now.

Or Chaplin: https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin I honestly don't think either of them do a good job of promoting their absolutely awesome work. I tell everyone I can about them, but they really need some presence at conferences or some big companies releasing case studies.

For more complete frameworks around Backbone, try: https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone-boilerplate http://walmartlabs.github.com/thorax/ https://github.com/marionettejs/backbone.marionette https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin Outside of Backbone, there's also http://emberjs.com/

I've been using chaplinjs as a backbone architecture for my last couple side projects and I really like it. https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin Simplified router, subviews, model binding techniques like described in the OP are all helpfully baked in.

I would say it's because you guys are doing it wrong. Backbone is just a very bare-bones backbone for your app. As you say, views don't provide anything. In fact backbone barely helps you with organizing your code at all. It's great for making a todos app but terrible for anything stretching across multiple pages, and with more than 10 views on a page. Let's be serious here. DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!! DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!! DON'T USE BACKBONE TO START A NEW APP!!! Use one of the higher level frameworks built around backbone. The most flexible / clean, decoupled framework (my preference) is: https://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.marionette If you like coffeescript: https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin If you want *only good views/layout: https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone.layoutmanager If you want model