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 production workflow


The development workflow that we built in the previous sections is an amazing improvement for the project; however, we are not finished yet. In this section, you will see how to optimize the project that is to be run in the production environments.

In this section, you will learn how to minimize your JavaScript and CSS files to obfuscate your source code and reduce the time the browser takes to load the asset files. The images can also be minified in order to reduce its weight without altering its appearance.

Gulp useref

The gulp-useref plugin processes your HTML files to concatenate your JavaScript and CSS assets into a single file. Please note that the JavaScript is already processed by Browserify, therefore, it is not necessary to process the JavaScript files with useref; on the other hand, CSS can be processed here.

You will need to install the plugin with npm as a development dependency:

$ npm install --save-dev gulp-useref

Then, to use it, you will need to...