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

Attaching a file into a resource


Before we start receiving files in the Express server, we need to set up a strategy for that. We still want to use the RESTful services, so changing the format of the transmission data is not an option.

Respecting the RESTful standard (for more on the REST design for file uploads, see http://bit.ly/1GXqPNY), we can attach a subresource endpoint under the target resource to handle the uploads, so that it will not disturb the original resource. However, this approach has a limitation: the resource should exist first, which means that you cannot create a contact and its avatar photo at the same time.

Following this approach, the endpoint for the avatar file uploading can be located at:

http://example.com/api/contacts/10/avatar

Figure 5.1 File uploading schema

The preceding figure shows the schema for how file uploading should be handled by the server; the avatar endpoint will handle POST requests encoded as multipart/form-data instead of JSON, because that's the...