Getting Started with Backbone.js Unlike its web development peers, JavaScript has never really had much in the way of frameworks to provide structure. Thankfully, in recent years, that's beginning to change. Today, I'd like to introduce you to Backbone.JS, a sweet little library that makes the process of creating complex, interactive and data driven apps so much easier. It provides a clean way to surgically separate your data from your presentation. Overview of Backbone.JS Sample App with Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap Backbone.js is a lightweight JavaScript framework that provides the basic infrastructure (Model, Collection, View, and Router classes) to bring structure to your Web applications. Twitter Bootstrap is a UI toolkit that provides simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript to implement popular user interface components and interactions. In other words, Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap focus on different areas of your application: core architecture and user interface respectively. Because of their well-defined and non-overlapping scope, Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap work well together. In general, I find a lightweight architectural framework and a UI toolkit to be a powerful combination, and an interesting alternative to full-stack frameworks: it gives you the flexibility to choose the library you like (if any) in the respective areas of your application.
Hello Backbone.js Tutorial Shameless advertisement: Don't forget to check out Agility.js, a simpler alternative to Backbone.js. Hello Backbone is a simple Backbone.js tutorial comprised of self-explanatory "hello world" examples of increasing complexity. It was designed to provide a smoother transition from zero to the popular Todos example. Yet Another Backbone.js Tutorial – Part 1 – Backbone.js Philosophy A couple of house keeping notes It’s been a while since our last post. Gabe’s been hard at work in Australia, hacking on a number of things. Rebecca & Brad have large, awesome projects in the works. Meanwhile I’ve switched jobs a couple of times :). All the while, we’ve been coding like mad and learning a ton of interesting things.
Organizing Your Backbonejs Application With Modules If you have spent any time looking at Backbone.js, like many others, you are probably amazed by how lightweight, flexible and elegant it is. Backbone.js is incredibly powerful, but not prescriptive in how it should be used. With great power comes great responsibility, and if you’ve tried to use Backbone.js for a large project you might be asking yourself: how do I organize my code? When thinking about “code organization” the questions you might be asking are: How do I declare and invoke Backbone types? Developing Backbone.js Applications - By Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) Available free for open-source reading below or for purchase via the O'Reilly store. Pull requests and comments always welcome. Prelude
Blog : Backbone.js: Sessions and Authentication Building an API driven Javascript app brings about challenges for authentication that I’ve taken for granted when working with traditional http frameworks. In this post, I’ll outline the basic concepts of what a session is, and how we manage sessions with Backbone.js. HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that nothing is remembered from one request to the next. D3.js Is Way More Than Just Another Visualization Framework If you're an experienced web developer, you probably (a) are intimately familiar with the DOM, and (b) still find data-driven JavaScript apps a little unusual. You may know about how Backbone.js has brought MVC architecture to the web -- and if you like data-driven programming, but aren't already using Backbone, you really need to check it out. (And if you're thinking about Backbone but can't quite dive fully into its particular brand of JavaScript MVC: DZone is hoping to publish a Backbone Refcard some time soon, so stay tuned!)
Backbone.js Tutorial: Build Environment This new Backbone.js tutorial series will walk you through building a single page web application that has a customised Backbone.sync implementation. I started building the application that these tutorials are based on back in August, and it's been running smoothly for a few months now so I thought it was safe enough to unleash it. Gmail to-do lists: not cool enough! The application itself was built to solve a need of mine: a more usable Google Mail to-do list. The Gmail-based interface rubs me the wrong way to put it mildly, so I wrote a Backbone.sync method that works with Google's APIs and stuck a little Bootstrap interface on top.
Backbone.js Wine Cellar Tutorial — Part 2: CRUD In Part 1 of this tutorial, we set up the basic infrastructure for the Wine Cellar application. The application so far is read-only: it allows you to retrieve a list of wines, and display the details of the wine you select. In this second installment, we will add the ability to create, update, and delete (CRUD) wines. RESTful Services As mentioned in Part 1, Backbone.js provides a natural and elegant integration with RESTful services.