An "isomorphic" framework, jsblocks can support server-side rendering via Node.js, founder Antonio Stolkov said in an email. But it is still a client-side framework. "Isomorphic has became a buzzword for frameworks that could be run on the client and on the server without modifying the code," he said.
Jsblocks leverages Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Collection, Model-View-ViewModel, and other Model View paradigms. Stolkov said that "jsblocks supports MVC (Model-View-Collection) like Backbone so it comes with already established paradigm out of the box. The difference is that jsblocks is a lot more powerful and fully featured than Backbone. It also has a different API for dealing with Models, Views, and Collections."
He said he has built open-source jsblocks so it would be good for building any kind of application. "You have the powerful MVC for large applications. You could stick with MVVM only for smaller applications. You could also do mobile and desktop development with jsblocks. In general I would say that you could get the most out of it doing single-page applications."
Stolkov sees jsblocks as distinct from other frameworks, including React, Meteor, and Angular.js. "React is only a UI library," he said. "It doesn't solve problems like routing, animations, sorting, paging, filtering, validation out of the box. React has a lot more different architecture than jsblocks."
Meteor, meanwhile, has a different idea, he said. "It does not have a pure server-side rendering; [it] just combines server- and client-side code in one file. You could use Meteor with React together. Meteor is powerful with its database integration. However, they stick with MongoDB, which seems to get a lot of negative feedback from large companies." And Angular has problems with the architecture of applications as well as performance.
Stolkov said he may move jsblocks from its current beta stage to a formal 1.0 release in three to four months. It is offered under an MIT license.