Adapt Learning Community: Backbone JS - what do you think about its future

Hi,

At work, there has been some talk about the future of Adapt Learning. More specifically, around the question of Backbone. There seems to be a shortage of developers who are familiar with Backbone (compared to say Angular, Vue or React) and more significantly, not so many developers who are interested in Backbone from a career/skill set point of view.

As such, I have some open questions that I'd like to put to the community:

- How significant an issue is it for an experienced or competent frontend developer not familiar with Backbone to be able to develop components relatively quickly?

- Does anyone consider that Backbone could be a reason not to adopt Adapt Learning?

I realise that these questions are really general and fall into the 'it depends/apples and oranges' category but any feedback or advice on the right questions to ask would be appreciated!

Best,

Cormac

I don't think that Backbone is a particularly difficult framework to pick up to be honest - I would think that any competent/experienced developer would be able to pick up enough to develop Adapt components in a few hours. Part of the reason it was chosen was that it was pretty easy to learn (it also had good support for IE8 which was of course still important back in 2013).

We are seriously considering moving away from Backbone, however. At the time Adapt was created it was a good choice of framework but since then things have moved on quite a bit - but in order to move to anything else we need to make some serious adjustments to the framework's core first. We'll also need to switch away from Bower.

We're getting near the finish line on the first of those changes (Adapt v3) - this release involves dropping all support for IE8/9/10 as well as taking the opportunity to have a general tidy up and some improvements to the accessibility functionality.

Adapt v4 will likely take the form of the restructuring necessary to allow for dropping Bower (probably in favour of webpack) and moving to new framework - almost certainly something reactive with a virtual DOM that doesn't have a high barrier to entry - at the moment Vue.js is looking like a very popular option.

Adapt v5 is I suspect when we'll finally make the switch.

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Hi Matt,

Thanks. That's the best answer I could have asked for! Some developers I spoke to raised their eyebrows at 'would be able to pick up enough to develop Adapt components in a few hours' but that's another story ;-)

All the best,

Cormac

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