Hey hacker news, I'm one of the primary authors of Thorax. Was rather surprised to find this on the front page as we are in the middle of revamping our docs and developer tools and weren't quite ready for press yet. We are working on a yeoman generator that sets you up with a Grunt + RequireJS project here:
I would recommend cloning that repo, running npm link then using it if you want to give Thorax a try. We'll be doing some more press about Thorax in a month or two.
For context, Walmart currently uses Thorax in production on mobile.walmart.com and we are working on a few other web apps that aren't public yet. It's not as sexy as Ember or Angular in many ways but it's a framework that grew directly out of building a very large Backbone application.
We've been ploughing through a redesign recently, and Thorax was on our shortlist of frameworks, along with Ember and vanilla Backbone, being "opinionated" and "battle-hardened. However, we found the documentation outdated in parts and it made it really hard to get things going in a short amount of time (Ember's documentation was an order of magnitude worse, however).
In the end we decided on vanilla Backbone, due to our needs and the possibility that Thorax was suffering bitrot (documentation is always the first thing to go). However, we'd like to give Thorax another try provided we can get what we need working.
Either way good work. Thorax is a sensible addition on top of Backbone.
Could you talk a bit more about production deployment?
I did a backbone project a year back and had lots of pain with things like require with CDNs, etc.
There was a post just 1-2 days back about performance tuning in Angular. I wonder if you recommend any best practices in your own from a performance/production perspective.
https://github.com/walmartlabs/generator-thorax
I would recommend cloning that repo, running npm link then using it if you want to give Thorax a try. We'll be doing some more press about Thorax in a month or two.
For context, Walmart currently uses Thorax in production on mobile.walmart.com and we are working on a few other web apps that aren't public yet. It's not as sexy as Ember or Angular in many ways but it's a framework that grew directly out of building a very large Backbone application.