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

Encoding the upload file


Another approach to uploading files is to encode the file into base64. When you encode a binary file to base64, the result is a string that we can use as an attribute in the request object.

Though it can be useful to create objects with the file attached in the resource, or to use it as another resource in the server, this is not a recommended approach. This approach has some limitations:

  • If the backend server is a node, the thread will be locked until the server decodes the base64 string. This will lead to a low-performance app.

  • You cannot upload large amounts of data.

  • If the file is large, the Backbone application will freeze until the file is encoded to base64.

If you are uploading very small amounts of data and don't have a huge amount of traffic, you can use this technique; otherwise, I encourage you to avoid it. Instead of uploading the file we can encode it:

class ContactEditor {
  // ...

showEditor(contact) {
      // ...
this.listenTo(contactPreview, 'avatar...