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

CommonJS modules


In recent years, Node has been gaining popularity in the software industry; indeed it is becoming a very popular choice for backend development in a full JavaScript technology stack. If you don't know about Node, you can think about it as JavaScript used in the server instead of a browser.

Node uses the CommonJS module syntax for its modules; a CommonJS module is a file that exports a single value to be used for other modules. It is useful to use CommonJS because it provides a clean way to manage JavaScript modules and dependencies.

To support CommonJS, Node uses the require() function. With require() you can load JavaScript files without the need to use <script> tags, instead calling require() with the name of the module/dependency that you need and assigning it to a variable.

To illustrate how CommonJS modules work, let's write a Node module and see how to use the require() function. The following code shows a simple module that exposes a simple object with the method...