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

Objects not provided by Backbone


It is possible to develop Backbone applications only using the Backbone objects that are described in the previous section; however, for a medium-to-large application, it's not sufficient. We need to introduce a new kind of object with delimited responsibilities that use and coordinate Backbone foundation objects.

Subapplication façade

This object is the public interface of the subapplications. Any interaction with the subapplications should be done through its methods. The calls made directly to internal objects of the subapplication are discouraged. Typically, methods on this controller are called from the router; however, they can be called from anywhere.

The main responsibility of this object is to simplify subapplication internals. Its main work is to fetch data from the server through models or collections and, if an error occurs during the process, it is responsible to show an error message to the user. Once the data is loaded in a model or collection, it creates a subapplication controller that knows the views which should be rendered and have the handlers deal with its events.

Subapplication controller

A controller acts like an air traffic controller for views, models, and collections. When given a Backbone data object, it will instantiate and render the appropriate views and then coordinate them. On complex layouts, it is not an easy task to coordinate the views with the models and collections.

The Business logic for the use cases should be implemented here. The subapplication controller implements a mediator pattern, allowing other basic objects such as views and models keep it simple and loose coupling.

Due to loose coupling reasons, a view should not directly call to methods or events of other views Instead of this, a view triggers events and the controller handles the event and orchestrates the views behavior if necessary. Note how views are isolated, handling just its owned portion of DOM and triggering events when required to communicate something.