This brings us to the end of the last chapter. The first big idea we looked at in this chapter is not loading any application data with the initial page load. If your application uses a lot of data, this can often be a good idea. Not only does this shorten the initial page load, but it also prevents you from loading data that the user doesn't need (for example, if the user never uses a specific feature of the application, the data needed for that feature never loads).

The other thing to remember from this chapter is that a Backbone application may not be just Backbone pages. Our scoreboard page is a good example of this. It wouldn't have been difficult to create that page via Backbone—just create a User model and a Users collection and a couple of views—but since the user records don't really have any client-side relevance, apart from being logged in, we took the simpler route of doing it from the server side. Your web app will likely have other pages too that don't need data: a contact...