• "What HTML would have been, had it been designed for building web-apps"
• Implements futuristic Web standards now (Web Components and Model Driven views)
• Created by Misko Hevery in 2009
• Open Source, supported by Google
• Extremely well documented
• Vibrant community of users
• Gaining traction in industry

Databinding Frameworks

• Facilitate Building Single Page Apps
  • Page never reloads
  • No server side page rendering
• Based on Moel View Controller concept
• Provide solution for:
  • Routing - handling updates to the URL hash fragment
  • Templating - dynamically creating and updating HTML based on templates and models
  • Data binding - synchronize the model and user interface
• Top data binding frameworks today
  • Angular.js
  • Knockout
  • Ember
  • jsViews
  • Can.js
  • Ractive

Foundation Libraries

• underscore - a widely adopted functional programming utility library, providing functional primitives such as map, reduce, each and filter. lo-dash is a replacement for underscore that boasts performance increases, bug fixes and additional features. underscore can be used in conjunction with angular.
• backbone - a tried and true bare bones mvc framework that provides fundamental features such as events, observable properties, and class-like inheritance. backbone also has foundational support for routing based on hash fragments and restful synchronization with a crud backend for persistence. backbone was one of the first on the javascript mvc library scene, and surely influenced angular.
• jquery - an industry standard library for dom manipulation and ajax. angular includes a jquery-like api with jqlite
• AMD - an industry standard for separating javascript projects across many files using modules. the top amd implementation is require.
  angular dependency injection follows a pattern extremely similar to (and likely influenced by) amd.
• Promises - an industry standard pattern for dealing with asynchronous control flow. the top promises implementation is q. async.js is another great asynchronous control flow library, from the node.js community. angular includes a q-like api with the $q service
• Handlebars - one of the top templating libraries. handlebars is derived from Mustache, which provides logic-less templates.
  use syntax similar to handlebars.