Book Image

Backbone.js Essentials

By : Jeremy Walker
Book Image

Backbone.js Essentials

By: Jeremy Walker

Overview of this book

<p>This book offers insight into creating and maintaining dynamic Backbone.js web applications. It delves into the the fundamentals of Backbone.js and helps you achieve mastery of the Backbone library.</p> <p>Starting with Models and Collections, you'll learn how to simplify client-side data management and easily transmit data to and from your server. Next, you'll learn to use Views and Routers to facilitate DOM manipulation and URL control so that your visitors can navigate your entire site without ever leaving the first HTML page. Finally, you'll learn how to combine those building blocks with other tools to achieve high-performance, testable, and maintainable web applications.</p>

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Backbone.js Essentials
Jeremy Walker
May, 2015 | 180 pages
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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Backbone.js Essentials
Backbone.js Essentials
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Building a Single-Page Site Using Backbone
Building a Single-Page Site Using Backbone
What is Backbone?
Why choose Backbone?
A Brief History of Web Development
Benefits of Backbone and single-page applications
Backbone and Its Competitors
Summary
2
Object-Oriented JavaScript with Backbone Classes
Object-Oriented JavaScript with Backbone Classes
JavaScript's class system
The new keyword
Prototypal inheritance
Extending Backbone classes
Applying parent methods
Introducing Underscore
More Underscore
Summary
3
Accessing Server Data with Models
Accessing Server Data with Models
The purpose of Models
Attributes, options, and properties
Getters and setters
Listening for events
Available events
Server-side actions
Return of Underscore
Summary
4
Organizing Models with Collections
Organizing Models with Collections
Working with Collections
Collections and Models
Adding to and resetting Collections
Indexing
Sorting
Events
Server-side actions
Underscore methods
Previously mentioned methods
Testing methods
Extraction methods
Ordering methods
Summary
5
Adding and Modifying Elements with Views
Adding and Modifying Elements with Views
Views are the core of Backbone-powered sites
Handling events
Rendering strategies
Summary
6
Creating Client-side Pages with Routers
Creating Client-side Pages with Routers
Backbone routers enable single-page applications
How Routers work
Backbone.history
Differences between routes and pages
Creating a new Router
Creating routes
Route styles
A note about routing conflicts
Trailing slashes
Redirects
404s and other errors
Routing events
Multiple routers
Page views
Summary
7
Fitting Square Pegs in Round Holes – Advanced Backbone Techniques
Fitting Square Pegs in Round Holes – Advanced Backbone Techniques
Taking it up a notch
Methods in place of properties
Overriding a class constructor
Class mixins
Publish/subscribe
Wrapping widgets of other libraries
Summary
8
Scaling Up – Ensuring Performance in Complex Applications
Scaling Up – Ensuring Performance in Complex Applications
Backbone and performance
Causes of performance issues
CPU-related performance issues
Event delegation
Bandwidth-related performance issues
Memory-related performance issues
Summary
9
What Was I Thinking? Documenting Backbone Code
What Was I Thinking? Documenting Backbone Code
Backbone and documentation
Documentation approaches
The non-documentation approach
The simple documentation approach
The robust documentation approach
Summary
10
Keeping the Bugs Out – How to Test a Backbone Application
Keeping the Bugs Out – How to Test a Backbone Application
Testing in JavaScript?
Which library to use
Getting started with Mocha
Introducing mocks
Selenium
Summary
11
(Not) Re-Inventing the Wheel – Utilizing Third-Party Libraries
(Not) Re-Inventing the Wheel – Utilizing Third-Party Libraries
The Backbone ecosystem
Dependency management with RequireJS
External dependency management with Bower
Paginating with Backbone Paginator
Rendering tables with Backgrid.js
Templating with Handlebars
Automating tasks with Grunt
New syntax with CoffeeScript
Making life easier with BackSupport
Summary
12
Summary and Further Reading
Summary and Further Reading
Putting it all together
What's Syapse?
Building your own Syapse
Further reading
Summary
Index
Index

What is Backbone?

Created in 2010 by Jeremy Ashkenas, Backbone is a part of an entirely new breed of JavaScript libraries. Depending on who you ask, this type of library can be referred to as a rich application framework, a single page library, a thick client library, or just a JavaScript framework. Whatever you choose to call them, Backbone and its related libraries, such as Angular, Ember, and CanJS, provide tools that can be used to build websites that are so powerful that they go beyond being mere sites and become full-fledged web applications.

Backbone is made up of the following five major tools:

  • A class system, which makes it easy to practice object-oriented programming

  • A Model class, which allows you to store and manipulate any kind of data as well as exchange this data with and from your remote server using AJAX

  • A Collection class, which allows you to perform the same data manipulation and transmission but on groups of Models instead

  • A View class, which can be used both to render the DOM elements that make up the page and to manage any user interactions that occur on them

  • A Router class, which enables you to create an entire site, with any number of virtual pages, using only a single HTML file

While conceptually very simple, together these components allow you to create websites with a level of sophistication and robustness previously unseen on the World Wide Web (WWW).

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