Book Image

Backbone.js Cookbook

By : Vadim Mirgorod
Book Image

Backbone.js Cookbook

By: Vadim Mirgorod

Overview of this book

<p>There is no doubt that the superior rendering power of HTML5, thin-to-thick client transition and REST style communication created a new era in web development, replacing the outdated approach based on browser plugin technologies. Backbone.js allows developers to write lightweight, modular, and scalable JavaScript applications.<br /><br />Backbone.js Cookbook contains a series of recipes that provide practical, step-by-step solutions to the problems that may occur during frontend application development using an MVC pattern. You will learn how to build Backbone applications utilizing the power of popular Backbone extensions and integrating your app with different third party libraries. You will also learn how to fulfill the requirements of the most challenging tasks.<br /><br />The first chapter of the book introduces you to the MVC paradigm and teaches you how to architect rich Internet applications operating with basic concepts of Backbone.js. During the reading of this book you will learn how to solve challenging problems leveraging Backbone objects such as models, collections, views, routers, and so on.</p> <p><br />You learn how to use forms, layouts, templating engines, and other Backbone extensions, which will help you to complete specific features of your application. You will understand how to bind a model to a DOM element. You will see how perfectly Backbone.js integrates with third party libraries and frameworks such as jQuery, Zepto, Underscore.js, Require.js, Mustache.js, Twitter Bootstrap, jQueryMobile, PhoneGap and many others. This book will guide you in how to optimize and test your applications, create your own Backbone extensions, and share them with the open source community.</p> <p><br />With the help of Backbone.js Cookbook, you will learn everything you need to know to create outstanding rich Internet applications using the JavaScript programming language.</p>

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Backbone.js Cookbook
Vadim Mirgorod
Aug, 2013 | 282 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Backbone.js Cookbook
Backbone.js Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Understanding Backbone
Understanding Backbone
Introduction
Designing an application with the MVC pattern
Defining business logic with models and collections
Modeling an application's behavior with views and a router
Creating an application structure from scratch
Writing your first Backbone application
Implementing URL routing in your application
Extending an application with plugins
Contributing to the Backbone project
2
Models
Models
Introduction
Creating a model
Operating with model attributes
Operating with the model identifier
Validating model attributes
Overriding getters and setters
Creating undo points to store/restore a model's state
Implementing workflow for a model
Using advanced validation in a model
Validating an HTML form
Working with nested attributes in a model
Implementing a one-to-one relationship
3
Collections
Collections
Introduction
Creating a collection of models
Getting a model from a collection by its index
Getting a model from a collection by its ID
Adding a model to a collection
Removing a model from a collection
Working with a collection as a stack or as a queue
Sorting a collection
Filtering models in a collection
Iterating through a collection
Chaining a collection
Running No SQL queries on a collection
Storing models of various types in the same collection
Implementing a one-to-many relationship
4
Views
Views
Introduction
Rendering a view
Dealing with a view element using jQuery
Rendering a model in a view
Rendering a collection in a view
Splitting a view into subviews
Handling Document Object Model (DOM) events in a view
Switching views using Backbone.Router
5
Events and Bindings
Events and Bindings
Introduction
Managing events in Backbone.js
Handling events of Backbone objects
Binding a model to a view
Binding a collection to a view
Bidirectional binding with Backbone.stickit
Binding a model and a collection to a select list
Handling keyboard shortcuts in a view
Handling router events
6
Templates and UX sugar
Templates and UX sugar
Introduction
Using templates in a view
Implementing a template loader
Using Mustache templates
Defining a form
Adding validation to a form
Handling form events
Customizing a form with the Bootstrap framework
Assembling layouts with LayoutManager
Building a semantic and an easily styleable data grid
How it works...
Drawing on the HTML5 canvas
7
REST and Storage
REST and Storage
Introduction
Architecting the REST API for the backend
Prototyping a RESTful backend with MongoLab
Synchronizing models and collections with a RESTful service
Building a RESTful frontend with Backbone
Using the polling technique to fetch data
Working with local storage
8
Special Techniques
Special Techniques
Introduction
Using mixins with Backbone objects
Creating a Backbone.js extension with Grunt
Writing tests for a Backbone extension with QUnit
Mocking up a RESTful service with jQuery Mockjax in asynchronous tests
Developing a mobile application with jQuery Mobile
Building an iOS/Android app with PhoneGap
Organizing a project structure with Require.js
Ensuring compatibility with search engines
Avoiding memory leaks in a Backbone application
Index
Index

Contributing to the Backbone project

Backbone.js is an open source project that has been developed by a strong community. In this recipe, we are going to speak about things that will help you became a part of this community and improve Backbone.js.

How to do it...

Let's follow the ensuing steps to make Backbone.js better:

  1. Work on the issue queue.

    If you found a bug in Backbone.js or want a new feature to be implemented, you can submit your issue to the issue queue at https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/issues. Before doing this, make sure there is no similar issue; otherwise, you can update the existing issue queue.

  2. Contribute code.

    You can submit your own code to the Backbone project. Such a contribution can be very helpful to the community and the project itself.

    By using Backbone, you save your own time. By contributing to the project, you save the time of other developers who use it and your own time in the future instead of having to work on the same issue again.

    Detailed guidelines for the code contributing process can be found on the wiki page at https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/wiki/Contributing-to-Backbone.

  3. Work on the documentation of Backbone.js.

    The official documentation, which is located at http://backbonejs.org, is based on a recent version of Backbone.js in the GitHub repository. You can improve the documentation by either updating the index.html file or the docs directory. If you want to add a new example, use the examples folder.

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