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

Modularizing templates


Until now, templates have been declared as script tags in the index.html file. While this is a good approach for small projects, it is not a good idea to put all your templates directly in the HTML file.

With Browserify, you can extract all your template files into individual files, with the advantage of modularization and a cleaner index.html file. Another benefit of modularizing templates is that you can pre-compile all the templates, saving resources in your users' browsers.

With Browserify, you can modularize almost any template format: jade, Handlebars, Underscore, and so on. It uses a transformation process described in Figure 4.5. If you have worked with other bundler tools such as webpack, transformations are analogous to pre-processors.

Figure 4.5 The transformation process

Templates are in plain text; the text is passed to a function that compiles it into a JavaScript function that Browserify can process as a regular JavaScript file. To apply the necessary transformation...