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 2. Managing Views

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Backbone views are responsible for managing DOM (Document Object Model) interactions between users and applications. A typical Backbone application is composed of many views with a very specific behavior; for instance, we can have a view to show contact data and another view to edit it. As you know, rendering a single view is a trivial task, but orchestrating a complex layout with multiple views can be a pain.

It's important to develop a better strategy to deal with complex view interactions to make the project easier to maintain and fun to develop. If you don't put the necessary attention into the organization of your views you can end up with a dirty DOM and messy code, which makes it hard to introduce new features or change existing ones.

As we did in the previous chapter, we are going to separate responsibilities by identifying common view use cases and then will learn how to compose layouts by using...