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

Uploading the avatar photo to contacts


Let's start by creating the endpoint to upload avatar photos:

// routes.js
var controller = require('./controller');

//...
server.post('/api/contacts/:contactId/avatar', 
controller.uploadAvatar);

Express itself does not process files automatically; it needs a plug-in that transforms the raw request into a more user-friendly API. This plug-in is named multer; it processes multipart/form-data, saving the file into a temporary path or making a buffer object, and then provides a JSON object with metadata information:

// Avatar endpoints
var upload = multer();
server.post('/api/contacts/:contactId/avatar', upload.single('avatar'),
controller.uploadAvatar
);
server.use('/avatar', express.static(__dirname + '/avatar'));

With the default configuration, it will save all the uploaded files into the temporary path of your operating system, which is /tmp in Unix systems; multer will attach a files attribute in the req object, which we can inspect to retrieve information...