Bringing Angular 2+ Development Experience into Backbone

Ive been working with Backbone for years and it suited me pretty well. I do love its conciseness. It gives the desired abstraction and yet leaves you at the full control of your app. When you need to know what exactly is happening in your app behind your code, its matter of minutes to go though the Backbone annotated sources and figure out the flow. Thats something you hardly can afford with other frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue or Amber. Besides its ridiculously small - its less than 8Kb without dependencies where the dependencies can be dropped if you go with Exoskeleton and Backbone.NativeView. I know that few today care about download size, but I do as it still affects the user response time.

Writing Backbone Applications in TypeScript

Nowadays JavaScript evolves fast. We have ECMAScript 6th and 7th editions released over just 2 years. the current support of ES6 specification in major browsers is close to 100%. So the language changed, and changed for better. It has become more expressive, much more concise and readable. It is tempting to jump into, but what about older browsers? Transpilers can translate ES.Next into the old-good JavaScript of ECMAScript 5th edition.

Then the question is which transpiler to pick up? Babel (https://babeljs.io/) is still on the rise, but look what is happening to TypeScript. Since it was chosen for Angular2 it is gaining its momentum. Why have they decided for TypeScript? Because its much more than transpiler. TypeScript enhances JavaScript with optional features such as static typing, interfaces, abstract classes, member visibility and more. Thats a completely new level, not available in plain JavaScript.