Robert Mosolgo

To my knowledge, batman.js is not maintained. For that reason, I don't suggest that you use it for a new project!

Is Batman.js Just for Ruby on Rails?

You can use batman.js with any backend!

Batman.js is not just for Ruby on Rails! Here are batman.js’s dependencies:

  • A RESTful JSON API
  • A way to compile the CoffeeScript app (may I recommend gulp.js?)
  • A way to provide HTML templates (again, gulp.js worked nicely for me!)

As long as you can meet those requirements, you can use batman.js with any backend: Node, Ruby, Python, Java, Go, Rust, Erlang, PHP … you get the drift.

Why Is Batman.js Associated with Rails?

A few reasons:

  • A lot of batman.js’s syntax and features are designed with Rails in mind
  • Batman.js was extracted from Shopify, which is a Ruby on Rails application
  • Rails meets all of the above requirements out of the box

Also, there are a few batman.js goodies for Rails devs: the batman.rails CoffeeScript extra and the batman-rails Ruby gem.