@davidw, Just use emberjs and focus on your app instead of boilerplate code. If you are coming from rails, emberjs is opinionated and should fit your style of thinking.

Emberjs makes building non-trivial easy while backbone makes building non-trivial apps hard but makes building small simple app easy.

People like talking about the size of emberjs but after you finishing stitching together numerous boilerplate code, you might end up with a bigger code base than emberjs and you are worst off as you have to maintain your boilerplate yourself rather than use a community curated codebase.

Two good getting started tutorial: http://trek.github.com/ http://emberjs.com/guides/router_primer/

Please i don't dislike backbonejs but we should use the right tool for the right job, backbone is not the right tool for non trivial app except you like boilerplate code. I also respect Jeremy Ashkenas. So my comments are not hate induced.