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

How Gulp works


As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Gulp is the most popular JavaScript task runner at the time of writing this book and that's the main reason why we chose it. Gulp and Grunt work in a similar way, they both use third-party plugins to work. Keep in mind that Gulp is more like a framework, it does not make too much by itself.

Gulp acts as the glue that coordinates the build workflow; it has some basic functionality and an API, which the Gulp plugins can use to do their work. The plugins use the compilers and utility programs that make the real file processing, such as the CoffeeScript transpiler. The plugins connect these programs to the Gulp workflow:

Figure 7.3 Relationship between Gulp plugins and libraries

The preceding figure shows the relationship that was described earlier, you can get a better idea of how Gulp connects with its plugins; notice how the plugins delegate the file processing to the utility programs that they connect to.

Gulp is composed of several...