Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

Book Image

Mastering Backbone.js

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 (17 chapters)
Mastering Backbone.js
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Dealing with Files

When you are building a Backbone application you will consume resources from a RESTful web service; however most of the RESTful services use the JSON format to encode information, but JSON is not suitable to send and receive files. How we can send files to a RESTful server?

If you are developing an application that is not JavaScript–intensive, you can send files through an HTML form, but in Single Page Applications (SPA) this is not the best way to do it. Another issue is that Backbone does not provide an easy mechanism to send files because it is not compatible with the RESTful specification.

But web applications need to work with files. There are some approaches to deal with this common issue. For example, you could use a traditional POST form on resources where files may be included; however, that's not a good option. In this chapter you will learn the following:

  • Handle file uploads from an Express server

  • Adopt strategies to send files to a RESTful server

  • Upload...