javascript frameworks
Since i already found last week that creating views with jquery is not easy i decided to explore alternatives first. Already from early check-ins i received recommendations for angular.js, knockout.js and backbone.js.
Taking this frame work comparison as a guide i excluded backbone.js, and because a friend from the singapore hackerspace had also recommended angular.js i started with that.
Implementation was straight forward. What i really liked was that i didn't have to redo my datastructure that i had made up beforehand, but angular.js allowed me to access and traverse the data in the form that it was available. After some trials i even managed to build that 3 levels deep nested loop. (Iterate over columns, then projects and then task-types)
Then i briefly tried knockout.js but dropped it quickly because it would have caused me to put ko.observable() all over the place. angular.js handles this way better in my opinion. It simply observes the whole dataset and checks for updates.
Other contenders from the above comparison table were ember.js and batman.js. I had a brief look at ember.js and found that similar to knockout it would force me to write a new object-based datastructure, so i dropped the idea. batman.js is written in coffeescript, which is interesting but i want to stick to pure javascript for now, so i'll explore that later.