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 controllers


Controllers are more complex than test as they have more dependencies than the models, collections, and views. If you explore the code on these objects, you will see that the only dependencies that they have are Backbone and Underscore.

You can test the controllers with all its dependencies, which means that while testing the ContactEditor controller, you will be testing all the views and models attached to it as the module requires these objects.

That's not good for unit testing as you will end up with integration tests instead. If the Contact model has a defect, then ContactEditor will fail, even if it does not have any error in it.

You need to isolate the modules from the mess of other modules. Keep in mind that you should trust your libraries as they will already have their test suites. We need a mechanism to fake the dependencies of a module.

With dependency injection, you can overwrite the require() function, instead of loading the script that points, in order to use...