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

What's a task runner?


A task runner is computer program that runs a sequence of tasks over your source code, applying transformations to the files. For example, consider that you are writing a source code in the CoffeeScript programming language, one task would be compiling all your source code in JavaScript, other task can be concatenating all the output JavaScript files in a single file, and the third task can finally be minifying the concatenated file to minimize the file size.

These tasks will automatically be run by the task runner, you just need to write a script file to program what needs to be done and then forget to run any command line again. The task runner provides triggers to start a task whenever you change a file so that it is done transparently.

As you can see, a task runner can improve your productivity as you can forget about the details of the compilation process once you have correctly configured a task runner. It will allow you to automate all these repetitive and boring...