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

Chapter 7. Build Like a Pro

Some years ago, you could create a website with PHP, upload your source files through FTP to a server, and then go online. During those days, JavaScript was a tight piece of the whole system, used for UI tasks such as validating forms or small chunks of functionality.

Today, web is more JavaScript intensive, we are building web applications instead websites, this means that JavaScript is no more a trivial piece of applications, it is now a core piece. For this reason, it is important to pack our JavaScript application before being deployed for production.

You will learn the following in this chapter:

  • Building a workflow to automatically process your source files

  • Minifying the application script size

  • Minifying the number of requests to the server when the application is loaded

  • Minifying the images

  • Optimizing the CSS files

  • Wiring up everything in an HTML file

  • Setting up a development environment to automatically reload the application

At the time of writing this book, there...