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

Browserify


With Browserify we can use Node modules directly in the browser. This means that you can build your projects with the power of the npm package manager and the Node module syntax exposed in the previous sections. Then Browserify can take your source code and apply some transformations to be able to run your code in the browser environment.

A very simple module that exposes an object with a method that prints a hello message can be written as a Node module:

// hello.js
module.exports = {
  sayHello: function(name) {
    name = name || 'world';
    console.log('hello', name);
  }
}

This simple piece of code can be loaded from another script as shown next:

// main.js
var hello = require('./hello');
hello.sayHello();        // hello world
hello.sayHello('abiee'); // hello abiee

This code works perfectly with Node. You can run it as follows:

$ node main.js

However this code will not run in the browser because the require function and the module object are not defined. Browserify takes your...