So far, all the applications that we've built have used plain old Backbone. This isn't to say that we haven't used helper libraries, but that we haven't yet used any libraries that extend Backbone itself. However, such libraries do exist; the Backbone GitHub wiki has a whole list of them (https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/wiki/Extensions%2C-Plugins%2C-Resources). In this chapter, we'll use one of these libraries to make building this application a little simpler.
We'll be focusing on the following ideas:
Using a third-party library to make large applications easier to handle
Doing real-time communication between the server and the client