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

Backbone and localStorage


To store Backbone models in localStorage, you can use the ID attribute as key and the serialized data as the value. However, remember that all the data in localStorage is mixed and this strategy will lead to identifier collisions.

Consider that you have two different models (contacts and invoices) with the same ID; when you store one of them in the localStorage, it will overwrite the other.

Another issue with localStorage is that when you want to retrieve data from the store before getting an item from the store, you need to know which key does it have. However, in localStorage, we don't have a clue about what IDs are currently in the store, therefore, we need a way to keep track of the IDs that are in the store at a given time.

To deal with these issues, you can create a well-known key in the store as an index of the IDs that are available for a given collection. See how it works in the following:

var data = localStorage.get('contacts'); // index name
varavailableIds...