Developing Backbone.js Applications

Preface

Not so long ago, data-rich web application was an oxymoron. Today, these applications are everywhere, and you need to know how to build them.

Traditionally, web applications left the heavy lifting of data to servers that pushed HTML to the browser in complete page loads. The use of client-side JavaScript was limited to improving the user experience. Now this relationship has been inverted—client applications pull raw data from the server and render it into the browser when and where it is needed.

Think of the Ajax shopping cart, which doesn’t require a refresh on the page when you add an item to your basket. Initially, jQuery was the go-to library for this paradigm. Its nature was to make Ajax requests, then update text on the page and so on. However, this pattern with jQuery revealed that we have implicit model data on the client side.

The rise of arbitrary code on the client side that can talk to the server however it sees fit has meant an increase in client-side complexity. Good architecture on the client side has gone from an afterthought to essential—you can’t just hack together some jQuery code and expect it to scale as your application grows. Most likely, you would end up with a nightmarish tangle of UI callbacks entwined with business logic, destined to be discarded by the poor soul who inherits your code.

Thankfully, there are a growing number of JavaScript libraries ...