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

Creating a development workflow


In this section, we will build a script to help us in the development process and, later, to build a production-ready script. You will need to install the basic dependencies first:

$ npm install --save-dev gulp gulp-load-plugins gulp-util

The gulp-load-plugins is useful to automatically load all the available plugins without manually requiring them in the gulpfile.js script; the gulp-util plugin provides utility functions such as log messages.

Bundling the JavaScript files with Browserify

The gulp-browserify plugin is currently deprecated and should not be used. The project author recommends using one of the recipes developed by the Gulp development team.

The recipes described in the repository needs to install some plugins first:

$ npm install --save-dev jstifywatchify vinyl-source-stream

In gulpfile.js, we can define the browserify task:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var $ = require('gulp-load-plugins')();
var browserify = require('browserify');
var jstify = require...