Knockout, KnockoutJS

Knockout is a standalone JavaScript implementation of the Model-View-ViewModel pattern with templates. The underlying principles are therefore:

• a clear separation between domain data, view components and data to be displayed

• the presence of a clearly defined layer of specialized code to manage the relationships between the view components

The latter leverages the native event management features of the JavaScript language.

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.

These features streamline and simplify the specification of complex relationships between view components, which in turn make the display more responsive and the user experience richer. Knockout was developed and is maintained by Steve Sanderson, a Microsoft employee. The author stresses that this is a personal open-source project, and not a Microsoft product.

Features of KnockoutJS

Knockout includes the following features:

• Declarative bindings

• Automatic UI refresh (when the data model's state changes, the UI updates automatically)

• Dependency tracking

• Templating (using a native template engine although other templating engines can be used, such as jquery.tmpl)