Backbone.js vs. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit vs. RequireJS vs. Sync Comparison Chart

Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. When working on a web application that involves a lot of JavaScript, one of the first things you learn is to stop tying your data to the DOM. It's all too easy to create JavaScript applications that end up as tangled piles of jQuery selectors and callbacks, all trying frantically to keep data in sync between the HTML UI, your JavaScript logic, and the database on your server. For rich client-side applications, a more structured approach is often helpful. With Backbone, you represent your data as Models, which can be created, validated, destroyed, and saved to the server.

RequireJS is a JavaScript file and module loader. It is optimized for in-browser use, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code. This setup assumes you keep all your JavaScript files in a "scripts" directory in your project. To take full advantage of the optimization tool, it is suggested that you keep all inline script out of the HTML, and only reference require.js with a requirejs call like so to load your script. All of them map to loading some/path/some/module.js. Ideally we could choose the CommonJS syntax, since it is likely to get more common over time, and we want to reuse code.