You're comparing apples and oranges, Knockout is a lib for structuring your app while this is a small lib that doesn't do anything more than data binds.
This could be used with backbone or any other lib that doesn't have data binds.
But thats for us, we do development on a framework we've built thats based on Backbone's elements (but thats just a part) one of the attractive things about Knockout has been its data-binding. So we'll look at this to see if we can add it to our stack.
One thing we really like about Backbone is you can rip out the component parts (Models, Views, Events etc) and add them to your own stack/framework, this seems like an extension of that model, which works well for us. Not that knockout does "too much" we could likely switch to using knockout, but that would likely be a big change to the stack we use. This is something smaller that we can add to our existing code without worrying too much.
Well, they do have different goals. Rivets wants to be a small plugin that works with any framework while knockout is also designed to bring structure to the party.
For me it's like comparing an engine with a car.
One big upside to knockout is that the lib is a little under 3KB minified while knockout is 40KB minified.
I prefer having smaller libraries that are really good at what they do.
What "structure" are we talking about with KO? I've been using it for a couple weeks just to do binding, and I haven't noticed it introducing any particular structure to my applications.
It is nothing like Backbone, which really seems to want you to write a "Backbone" app.
