Backbone.js is a lightweight JavaScript library that adds structure to your client-side code. Developers commonly use libraries like Backbone.js to create single-page applications (SPAs). SPAs are web applications that load into the browser and then react to data changes on the client side without requiring complete page refreshes from the server.

Backbone is mature, popular, and has both a vibrant developer community as well as a wealth of plug-in and extensions available that build upon it. It has been used to create non-trivial applications by companies such as LinkedIn.

Backbone focuses on giving you helpful methods for querying and manipulating your data rather than re-inventing the JavaScript object model. It’s a library, rather than a framework, that plays well with others and scales well, from embedded widgets to large-scale applications.

Backbone provides a minimal set of data-structuring (Models, Collections) and user interface (Views, URLs) primitives that are helpful when building dynamic applications using JavaScript. It’s not opinionated, meaning you have the freedom and flexibility to build the best experience for your web application how you see fit. You can either use the prescribed architecture it offers out of the box or extend it to meet your requirements.

There are no performance drawbacks to using Backbone to structure your application. It avoids run loops, two-way binding, and constant polling of your data structures for updates and tries to keep things simple where possible. That said, should you wish to go against the grain, you can of course implement such things on top of it.