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.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Testing views


Views manage the relationship between data (such as, models or collections) and the user interactions (DOM). In the case of views, you should test for the following:

  • Rendering: Given a model or collection, you should verify that the output HTML is the right one

  • Events: This verifies that the DOM events are handled correctly

  • Model changes: If the model changes something, the view should be in sync

For this example, we are going to test the ContactForm view; the responsibility of this view is to show a form to the user and then get the user input to update a model.

When making test on views, it is recommended to use a fake model and not the original Contact model. The main reason for this is to isolate the ContactView object so that if a test fails, you will know that the error is isolated in the view and does not depend on the Contact model.

You can start testing whether the rendered HTML is right, as follows:

var Backbone = require('backbone');
var ContactForm = require('../../.....