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 4. Modular Code

As your project's code grows, the number of scripts in the project will be more and more, incrementing script-loading complexity. The classic way to load JavaScript files is to write a<script> tags for every script you have, but you have to do it in the right order; if you don't, your code could stop working. That's not an efficient way for medium-size projects.

What happens if you forget the order of loading? What if you make a refactorization on the code and the order of the script changes? It will be a pain to fix it and keep track of all the code and its dependencies.

This problem has been addressed in different ways. One is to create a module syntax to create, load, and declare explicitly the dependencies of modules; the syntax is called AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition). The AMD modules define a list of module dependencies, and the code inside the module will be executed only after the dependencies are fully loaded.

The dependencies...