React was a major improvement over Backbone + Marionette. Pre-jQuery was a shit-show as they hadn't even standardised the DOM.

Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.

Give me Backbone + anything over React. Backbone was the last time I really felt close to the web page I was creating.

	▲	chipx86 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We're still using it for our stuff (via our @beanbag/spina TypeScript wrapper for Backbone that has a few additional niceties), and I feel the same way. We can be as close to the DOM as we need (or let something manage it for our view for us), we can be smart about where data lives and how things interact with it/listen for changes, and we get a decent little object model that doesn't dictate how we think about everything. Very happy still with the Backbone way of building webapps.

SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

XML, XMLHttpRequest, and XSLT in IE 5 was peak web dev for me. Never been more productive.

biinjo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh boy the ActiveXObject brings back some ~~ptsd~~ fond memories.