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

Express server

To demonstrate how to send files to a server, in this chapter we will work with the latest version of Express (the latest version available at the time of writing is Express 4.x). The server will be responsible for storing the REST resources and handling file uploads. Please consult the GitHub repo for this book to get the implementation of the server for the previous chapters.

For now, the current server is able to create, get, update, and delete contact resources; we need to add a mechanism to upload an avatar image for a contact. For simplicity the application does not use a database to store its data, but instead uses a hash table to store all data in memory. For example, the next snippet demonstrates how to store a contact:

// Insert a new contact JSON into the contacts array
createContact(req, res) {
var contact = extractContactData(req);

  // Asssign a random id
  contact.id = makeId();
contacts.push(contact);

res.status(201)
.json(contact);
}