Marionette expects you to handle the Model and Collection loading yourself. There are 10,000 ways of doing that, and I’m not going to try and force you to do it a certain way.

Once you have your models and collections loaded, though, Marionette will render them for you. You shouldn’t have to write your own render methods. That’s part of the most immediate value that Marionette provides.

The reason I don’t show loading the models and collections in my examples is because it’s not relevant. It doesn’t matter how you load data in to them. It only matters that you have data in them – whether it’s hard coded or loaded from an API, or uses lazer beams to reflect binary patterns off your bathroom mirror in to an IR device :D … doesn’t matter, up to you. Marionette uses your model and collection, with whatever data they have, and handles the rendering for you.

A good starting point: http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-fundamentals/#exercise-2-book-library—your-first-restful-backbone.js-app or my own Backbone screencasts (slightly out-dated, but the principles still apply) http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-dback/hands-on-backbone-js

I’ve been coding with plain Backbone for just about 2 weeks now and in that short time have encountered quite a few areas where I wanted a bit more / different functionality and slowly started down the road of extending the framework with my own extensions to solve various issues.. unbinding events, multiview controllers, event aggregators / event busses for different areas of the application (I called them EventRelay) etc.

It has been a good way to get to know the workings of Backbone and underscore both of which are completely new to me. Anyway, seeing this has given me two things, firstly joy in knowing others are doing things similarly, secondly sadness I didn’t check it out earlier! Next development iteration I may consider switching out to Marionette where possible as you’ve already solved many things more, Geppetto is going to be worth a look too.

Keep up the great work guys, really appreciate these articles too

The main problem with new frameworks is the lack of examples and references, you can add your thoughts here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10847852/what-are-the-real-world-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-the-many-frameworks-based-on
so people will understand more about your implementation (and know it exists).

In fact, I am using it every day as part of a large enterprise application I’m building for my “day job.” So far, Geppetto is doing everything I need it to, so there hasn’t been a need to make any changes lately. It does need more unit tests, however.
So far I haven’t had a whole lot of feedback from the community, and I’m not sure if anyone is using it at all! So if you give it a try, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m open to making changes, since it’s still an early release.