Developing Backbone.js Applications

Chapter 1. Introduction

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “You can’t make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.” In this book, I hope to shed some light on how to improve the structure of your web applications, opening doors to what will hopefully be more maintainable, readable applications in your future.

The goal of all architecture is to build something well—in our case, to craft code that is enduring and delights both us and the developers who will maintain our code long after we are gone. We all want our architecture to be simple, yet beautiful.

Modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries can bring structure and organization to your projects, establishing a maintainable foundation right from the start. They build on the trials and tribulations of developers who have had to work around callback chaos similar to that which you are facing now or may face in the near future.

When you are developing applications using just jQuery, the missing piece is a way to structure and organize your code. It’s very easy to create a JavaScript app that ends up a tangled mess of jQuery selectors and callbacks, all desperately trying to keep data in sync between the HTML for your UI, the logic in your JavaScript, and calls to your API for data.

Without something to help tame the mess, you’re likely to string together a set of independent plug-ins and libraries to make up the functionality or build everything from scratch and have to maintain it yourself. Backbone ...