Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

By : Abiee Echamea
Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

By: Abiee Echamea

Overview of this book

Backbone.js is a popular library to build single page applications used by many start-ups around the world because of its flexibility, robustness and simplicity. It allows you to bring your own tools and libraries to make amazing webapps with your own rules. However, due to its flexibility it is not always easy to create scalable applications with it. By learning the best practices and project organization you will be able to create maintainable and scalable web applications with Backbone.js. With this book you will start right from organizing your Backbone.js application to learn where to put each module and how to wire them. From organizing your code in a logical and physical way, you will go on to delimit view responsibilities and work with complex layouts. Synchronizing models in a two-way binding can be difficult and with sub resources attached it can be even worse. The next chapter will explain strategies for how to deal with these models. The following chapters will help you to manage module dependencies on your projects, explore strategies to upload files to a RESTful API and store information directly in the browser for using it with Backbone.js. After testing your application, you are ready to deploy it to your production environment. The final chapter will cover different flavors of authorization. The Backbone.js library can be difficult to master, but in this book you will get the necessary skill set to create applications with it, and you will be able to use any other library you want in your stack.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Chapter 1. Architecture of a Backbone application

One of the best things about Backbone is the freedom to build applications with the libraries of your choice, no batteries included. Note that Backbone is not a framework but a library; due to this, building applications with Backbone can be challenging as no structure is provided. You, as a developer, are responsible for code organization and how to wire the pieces of the code across the application; it's a big responsibility. Bad decisions can lead to buggy and unmaintainable applications that nobody wants to work with.

Code organization on small Backbone applications is not a big deal. Create a directory for models, collections, and views; put a router for all possible routes; and write the business logic directly in the views. However, this way of developing Backbone applications is not suitable for bigger projects. There should be a better way to separate responsibilities and file organization in order to create maintainable applications.

This chapter can be difficult to understand if you don't know Backbone at all; to understand the principles that are exposed here better, you will need to understand at least the basics of Backbone. Therefore, if you are a beginner in Backbone, I would encourage you to first understand what Backbone is and how it works.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the best practices of project organization on two main levels: logic organization and file structure. In this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • Delegating the right responsibilities to the objects provided by Backbone
  • Defining plain JavaScript objects in order to deal with logic out of scope of Backbone objects
  • Splitting the application in to small and maintainable scripts
  • Creating a clean file structure for your projects