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Comment by prottmann | Hacker News Reader

But the same you can say about many other frameworks.

Knockout got attention, but there are so many frameworks that it is not so easy to see the big advantage of one.

Knockout is more of a library then a framework.

I tend to use Angular, but recently I jumped onto a project and crunched through some work by dropping Knockout into it. The learning curve is small, and I was able to finish off the feature quickly.

I like knockout, I'm using it on a big project at the moment. Compared to say Angular it is definitely much easier to learn.

My complaint (probably more relevant to hardwaresofton) is that I like my MVVM to have a type resolution system, ok in javascript this is hard, but if I've got one ViewModel for the NavBar, it would be nice to be able to better state the one for the MainContentArea. ko.ApplyBinding(vm, someJQuery) just doesn't strike me as elegant!

I would argue its only easier to learn than Angular because it is smaller. Just data binding in AngularJS is much easier to me.

That said, I liked knockout when looked at it, I just looked at Angular shortly after and fell in love. Annnd, I haven't looked at the new version, so grain of salt.

I like the way Angular manages nested $scopes a lot better than the ko.ApplyBinding paradigm. We are constantly have to add wrapper DIVs and clobbering each others ViewScope in Knockout.JS. It's not the end of the world, by any means.

I use a single viewmodel with multiple objects and the "with" binding to deliver that pretty effectively. You still get the ko.applyBinding(view) call but can have common HTML.

We went to that after hell with pages littered with applyBinding calls.

If you like frameworks that do one thing, and one thing well, then you'll like knockout. Amazing data-binding system

But for only one thing i would not use a framework, a library like http://ractivejs.org is enough for that.

That looks pretty similar to Knockout - I don't think you can really claim that one is a library and the other a framework.

Ractive.js just cares about the view - everything else is up to you.

Yes, but the same is true of Knockout - it has no server-side ajax functionality. I'm looking at the code on the example pages and it's solving essentially the same problem as Knockout (there's even a shout out to Knockout on the homepage).

The main difference seems to be that in Knockout has 'observables' that are part of your view model, whereas with Ractive you interact with your view model via Ractive's functions.

Sorry I think of knockout as more of a library than a framework. It's called a framework (and often the smallest/lightest one), but most of the real work is really only done in one or two places

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