Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

MooTools VS Backbone.js

Compare MooTools VS Backbone.js and see what are their differences

MooTools logo MooTools

MooTools (My Object-Oriented Tools) is a lightweight, object-oriented, web-application framework...

Backbone.js logo Backbone.js

Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events
  • MooTools Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-24
  • Backbone.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

MooTools features and specs

  • Modularity
    MooTools is composed of a collection of modular libraries that allow developers to pick and choose only the components they need for their projects, thereby reducing the project's overall size and complexity.
  • Cross-browser compatibility
    MooTools provides a unified interface and set of tools that ensure consistent behavior across different web browsers, which was particularly beneficial during times when browser discrepancies were more pronounced.
  • Powerful Object-Oriented Programming
    MooTools offers a robust OOP approach, allowing developers to create class-based structures with easy extensibility and inheritance, making codebases more organized and maintainable.
  • Rich Effects Library
    MooTools includes a sophisticated set of tools for creating animations and effects, which can enhance user interfaces with smooth and polished interactive elements.
  • Strong Community Support
    Despite being less popular today, MooTools has a solid amount of historical documentation and community-driven resources that can aid in development.

Possible disadvantages of MooTools

  • Decreased Popularity
    MooTools has seen a decline in usage and community support compared to more modern libraries like React or Vue.js, which can lead to challenges finding support and resources.
  • Compatibility Issues with Modern Libraries
    MooTools can sometimes conflict with other JavaScript libraries, particularly newer ones that have different methodologies and structures.
  • Large Library Size
    While modular, including the full MooTools library or many of its unnecessary components can lead to increased download size and impact performance.
  • Steeper Learning Curve
    MooTools employs a more rigid OOP structure that might be complex for new developers who are unfamiliar with its conventions compared to more modern, component-based frameworks.
  • Limited Modern Features
    MooTools lacks some of the advanced features and optimizations present in newer frameworks and libraries, which can limit its utility in modern web development scenarios.

Backbone.js features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Backbone.js is minimal and lightweight, which means it has a small footprint and adds very little overhead to your project.
  • Flexibility
    Backbone.js provides a flexible structure to developers by allowing them to build their own MVC or MVP architectures using models, views, collections, and routers.
  • Ease of Integration
    Backbone.js can be easily integrated with other libraries and frameworks, such as jQuery or underscore.js, enhancing its capabilities without much difficulty.
  • Large Community
    Backbone.js has been around for a long time, resulting in a large community and a plethora of plugins and extensions that can be leveraged.
  • Detailed Documentation
    The official site offers comprehensive documentation which includes tutorials, examples, and a detailed API reference, aiding developers to understand and utilize the library efficiently.

Possible disadvantages of Backbone.js

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New developers might find Backbone.js difficult to learn due to its non-opinionated nature and lack of enforced structure.
  • Sparse In-Built Features
    Backbone.js provides only the basic building blocks, requiring developers to write more boilerplate code or rely on external libraries for additional functionalities.
  • Outdated
    As newer frameworks and libraries (like React, Vue, and Angular) have emerged with more robust features and better performance, Backbone.js has somewhat fallen out of favor in modern development practices.
  • Event Binding Complexity
    Managing event bindings in Backbone.js can become complex and sometimes messy in large applications, which can lead to difficult maintenance and debugging.
  • Limited Two-Way Data Binding
    Backbone.js does not provide two-way data binding out-of-the-box, unlike other frameworks such as Angular, necessitating additional code to sync views and models.

MooTools videos

MooTools as a General Purpose Application Framework

Backbone.js videos

Introduction to Backbone.js

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Backbone.js
  • Review - Backbone.js Code Review w Backbone.js Mentor Jonathon

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MooTools and Backbone.js)
Javascript UI Libraries
10 10%
90% 90
JavaScript Framework
5 5%
95% 95
JS Library
16 16%
84% 84
Front-End Frameworks
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare MooTools and Backbone.js

MooTools Reviews

Top 15 jQuery Alternatives To Know
It has good documentation support and practices object-oriented methodology. It offers DOM enhancements that help developers with the addition, modification, and deletion of DOM elements. MooTools also has the element storage component. It is free, open-source, and available under the MIT license.

Backbone.js Reviews

20 Next.js Alternatives Worth Considering
A veteran on the scene, Backbone.js is all about giving structure to your JavaScript-heavy applications. It’s standing the test of time, enabling you to keep your data logic and display logic neatly side by side, all while being lightweight.
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
Backbone.js is based on the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The library supports seven components: Models, Views, Collections, Routers, Events, Sync, and Options. Backbone.js also provides an asynchronous communication layer that allows the application to communicate with a backend service.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Backbone.JS is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides a framework for developing structured and scalable web applications. It offers a set of tools for building client-side applications that interact with RESTful APIs. Backbone.JS is well-suited for developing single-page applications (SPAs) where most of the user interface is rendered in the browser, rather than...
Source: www.bocasay.com
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Backbone.js is a JavaScript-based framework that connects to an API via a RESTful JSON interface. Backbone.js is known for being small and light because it only requires jQuery and one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, to use the entire library.
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
Backbone JS is a JavaScript framework based on the MVP app design. As the name suggests, it acts as a strong backbone to your project. It is lightweight in nature and hence, is considered ideal for developing single-page applications. It offers a simplistic frontend and makes the best use of JavaScript functions.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Backbone.js should be more popular than MooTools. It has been mentiond 17 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

MooTools mentions (2)

  • Building a dynamic Canvas rendering engine using JSX
    JSX, in my opinion, was the biggest innovation that came out of React given that you could write HTML directly in your JavaScript. I had used other frameworks such as MooTools in the past. You could use them to dynamically construct HTML in JavaScript, but with a very verbose and tedious syntax. It looked very similar to the converted code above. And it worked, but it was not satisfying or pleasant. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • jQuery 3.6.0 Released - "We still have our eyes on a jQuery 4.0 release"
    For those who don't like jQuery - there is a great alternative https://mootools.net/ 😃. Source: about 4 years ago

Backbone.js mentions (17)

  • JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI
    Https://backbonejs.org/#View There is also a github repo that has examples of MVC patterns adapted to the web platform. - Source: Hacker News / 26 days ago
  • JavaScript evolution: From Lodash and Underscore to vanilla
    Underscore was created by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone.js) in 2009 to provide a set of utility functions that JavaScript lacked at the time. It was also created to work with Backbone.js, but it slowly became a favorite among developers who needed utility functions that they could just call and get stuff done with without having to worry about the inner implementations and browser compatibility. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • React is 10 years old
    Got it thanks for the context. I've read the web app and it seems to me it is just https://backbonejs.org/ re-written in Typescript and allows JSX. I'm very certain Typescript and JSX will have improved the DX for Backbone like apps, but it doesn't address all of the other issues that teams had with Backbone. e.g. Cyclical event propagation, state stored in the DOM (i.e. Appendchild is error prone in large code... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
    Even further nowadays, docs are created using Docusaurus. I don't have problem with it but documentation should be good (eye) friendly than easy to write. Why not be creative while writing docs such as - Backbone.js - https://backbonejs.org Or https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html as code annotation. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • The Emperor's New Library
    What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing MooTools and Backbone.js, you can also consider the following products

React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

AngularJS - AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

ExpressJS - Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple

ember.js - A JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web apps

Thymeleaf - Thymeleaf is a modern server-side Java template engine for both web and standalone environments.