I have done a large Backbone.js project for my last employer. I was on that for about 18 months. I have not done a project with both Backbone.js and AngularJS in the same project. I know some people do that but I truly cannot think of anything Backbone.js brings to that party.
As for Backbone.js by itself... It's OK, I liked it but we had a large project with as many has half a dozen people working on it at its peak and the problem we got into was all of the huge gaps in Backbone.js that you typically fill with other software (two-way binding, validation, templating, AMD, etc.) and if you don't figure out your solutions for all of those gaps before you start every developer in the group ends up filling it his or her own way. Especially if you're under a time crunch and writing really fast.
We ended up with a working project at the end and it was way faster than their old solution but it was a chimera. Every part of it appeared to be a different animal. With AngularJS a lot more of those parts are part of the framework itself and there's less room for that kind of problem. I'm using it for large project work now and liking it a great deal more.
This is a really helpful answer for n00bs like myself. Often the differences between technologies emerge not at 'hello world' or 'to do', but in larger projects or working with teams. It's very hard for someone like myself to see those differences for ourselves, at least not until we've been through it a couple of times. Thanks.
Do I know you?! This sounds exactly like what happened at my place of work. I've also already filled in all the Backbone.js gaps, but Angular.js seems easier to get a team all working in the same direction.
Also, I didn't mean one project using both Angular and Backbone.
No, but I'm also interested in this. I've been looking at Ember.js / Backbone.js / Angular.js for a new cross-platform mobile project and leaning towards Angular.
Some of my colleagues did some perf testing for mobile and found Angular.js was not suitable (I guess due to the compilation it does). I don't have any numbers unfortunately, but I think we use mostly Backbone for mobile projects here.
Thanks for the tip. Would be interested in stats. It's such a timesink to evaluate any of this new stuff. There's clearly a market for a tomshardware.com equivalent for frameworks and software stacks.
See my reply to welder above on the topic of Backbone.js. I had just finished a project using it before I came to this job and I was quite certain I didn't want to use Backbone.js again. I knew there were better solutions out there. The t-shirt thing was actually an experiment to try out AngularJS and see if it was good enough for our needs here.
I had meant to do the same with Ember.js as well but AngularJS did the job so well that I decided to just go with it. So possibly Ember.js is even better. I don't know. But I can say we haven't really regretted AngularJS yet.
1. Angular.js vs Backbone.js from experience of their differences
2. Angular.js with Require.js (I already know about Backbone.js AMD architecture)
Has anyone done a large project in both Backbone.js and Angular.js?