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.

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Mastering Backbone.js
Abiee Echamea
Jan, 2016 | 278 pages
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Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Architecture of a Backbone application
1. Architecture of a Backbone application
Subapplications based architecture
Responsibilities of Backbone objects
Objects not provided by Backbone
Contacts application
Summary
2
2. Managing Views
2. Managing Views
Identifying view types
ModelView
CollectionView
Region
Layout
Putting it all together
Rendering third-party plugins
Conclusions
3
3. Model Bindings
3. Model Bindings
Manual binding
Two-way binding
Data binding with plugins
Binding embedded data
Validating model data
Summary
4
4. Modular Code
4. Modular Code
CommonJS modules
NPM and package.json
Browserify
Application dependency
Using Browserify in the app
Modularizing templates
Summary
5
5. Dealing with Files
5. Dealing with Files
Express server
Attaching a file into a resource
Uploading the avatar photo to contacts
Uploading images from Backbone
Uploading the avatar image at creation time
Encoding the upload file
Summary
6
6. Store data in the Browser
6. Store data in the Browser
The localStorage
Backbone and localStorage
Store models in localStorage
Store Backbone models in localStorage
Backbone.sync
IndexedDB
IndexedDB in Backbone
Summary
7
7. Build Like a Pro
7. Build Like a Pro
Development workflow
What's a task runner?
How Gulp works
Getting started with Gulp
Creating a development workflow
Creating a production workflow
Summary
8
8. Testing Backbone Applications
8. Testing Backbone Applications
Testing tools
Getting started with Jasmine
Karma test runner
What and how to test Backbone applications
Testing models and collections
Testing views
Testing controllers
Testing the subapplication Façade
Summary
9
9. Deploying to Production
9. Deploying to Production
Heroku
Production environment
The HTTP Server
Do not run as root
Process Management
Summary
10
10. Authentication
10. Authentication
Stateless API authentication
Implementing HTTP Basic Authentication
Implementing OAuth authentication
Summary
11
Index
Index

Backbone.sync

This is responsible to handle connections between a RESTful server and the Backbone application is the Backbone.sync module. It transforms the fetch() and save() operations into HTTP requests:

  • fetch() is mapped as a read operation. This will make GET to the the urlRoot attribute with the model ID for a model or the url attribute for a collection.

  • save() is mapped as a create or update operation; it depends on the isNew() method:

    • This will be mapped as create if the model does not have an ID (isNew() method return true). A POST request is executed.

    • This will be mapped as update if the model already has an ID (isNew() method returns false). A PUT request is executed.

  • destroy() is mapped as a delete operation. This will make DELETE to the the urlRoot attribute with the model ID for a model or the url attribute for a collection.

To better understand how Backbone.sync does its job, consider the following examples:

// read operation will issue a GET /contacts/1
varjohn= new Contact...
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