Why I love KnockoutJS

I love KnockoutJS. Aside from SQL, no technology I've encountered has inspired me quite to the level Knockout has. There's a captivating elegance to it's simplicity, and by proxy the ease in which you can learn it.

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Despite it's simplistic nature, it can transform JavaScript previously bound for spaghetti-town into artful solutions. It is my tool of choice for any project, of any scale, requiring any JavaScript. It enforces organization (components, custom bindings, extensions) without imposing conventions.

Knockout is a data-centric JavaScript library, enabling you to bind data to your DOM. At it's core, this is all Knockout does. Exposing a simple pub/sub concept, dubbed an "observable" (there is of course much more to it). Using the observable enables you to build reactive client-side applications with minimal effort.

What Knockout isn’t:

A framework. It is a library, intended to work in unison with your other technologies.
A complete solution. You’ll often add additional libraries to suit your use-case (ex: to implement routing you could add in Sammy.js)
Slow. If done correctly (deferred updates, using pure computed functions and binding to prototypes) you can achieve tremendous performance.
Only good for small projects. Knockout can scale amazingly, I've built/worked on several large-scale projects with great success.
Equipped with training wheels. Unlike other JavaScript libraries/frameworks, Knockout is wildly unopinionated and leaves virtually all the decision making to you. If you're a seasoned engineer, or working with one, this can be a tremendous positive.

What Knockout is:

Awesome.
Focussed. It offers several core concepts, that serve as a foundation for building modern data-drive client applications.
Adaptive. It is small enough to be justifiable on small projects, and powerful enough to use on large applications.
Empowering. Using Knockout puts the decisions in your hands, you will build it all and thus understand it all. My favorite analogy is a carpenter building a piece of furniture vs. an individual putting together a piece of Ikea furniture.
Organized. Once you begin thinking like a "Knockout" programmer, you can achieve a wonderful separation of your view logic, event handlers, components and data bindings.

As someone who uses Knockout daily, I am admittedly biased toward the advantages of the small-but-mighty library. But the power in the small concepts it exposes, are undeniably amazing. I highly recommend giving it a self.peek() on your next project.