I\'ve been reading articles such as this one that indicates web development has

Question

I've been reading articles such as this one that indicates web development has evolved to use JS frameworks. Where I work, we have a massive website with many existing web applications that are already established and are server side heavy.

One article I read said that the DOM manipulation/jQuery method leads to unmaintanable spaghetti code, and that you should strive to use a JS MV* framework. However, sometimes I just have a fairly simple list of items generated from the server; something like:

<div class=shower data-id=1>show</div>
<ul><li class=hider data-id=1>one</li></ul>
//js
$(".shower").on("click", function () {
    $(".hider[data-id=" + $(this).data("id") + "]").show();
});
...and that would pretty much be the extend of the JS on that page. According to the MV* framework disciples, the need to reference specific classes or attributes in the JS is a problem and models should be used instead. However, it seems like overkill to include a massive library for creating rich applications to handle some fairly trivial DOM manipulation and animations.

Is there a JS framework in existence that bridges the gap between complete front-end stack frameworks and tightly coupled HTML/JS? If not, how could I write such code to avoid this coupling?

Additionally is there any reason to push strongly for making the switch to such a framework for established server-heavy applications (especially in cases where we have to support JavaScript being turned off)?

Explanation / Answer

The author of the article you linked seems to have forgotten about server-side HTML generation completely. You don't need all that JS ceremony to create a data-driven web page; the JS is there to augment the page, not generate it.

That said, none of these JS frameworks is all that large. "Massive library" is a mischaracterization. I suspect that if you make the attempt to write such code to avoid tight coupling, you'll be reinventing Backbone/Ember/Angular anyway.

If you're genuinely worried about the library size, use Resig's Micro-Templating, which weighs in at about thirty lines of javascript. Alternatively, you can get a custom-tailored recommendation for a JS framework at one of the links below.

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