This week’s open-source project is Knockout (KO) and it works purely on JavaScript. KO is a JavaScript MVVM (a modern variant of MVC) library that enables developers to create rich, desktop-like user interfaces with JavaScript and HTML.
KO uses “observers” that help the UI stay in sync with an underlying data model and declarative bindings to enable productive development, according to Knockout’s page on GitHub.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is that rich client side user interfaces are too complicated to do even when you’re using something like jQuery,” said Steve Sanderson, the creator of KO.
It runs on JavaScript, works with any web framework, and supports all mainstream browsers.
KO’s website explains that the library provides a complementary, high-level way to link a data model to a UI and lets users scale up in complexity without fear of introducing inconsistencies.
“By encapsulating data and behavior into a view model, you get a clean, extensible foundation on which to build sophisticated UIs without getting lost in a tangle of event handlers and manual DOM updates,” the website states.
