Full Stack Web Development with Backbone.js

Chapter 10. Automated Workflows

As your application grows and you start working as a team with multiple developers, questions on workflow, coding style, and testing become important. Tools to organize workflows help to apply conventions and bring applications to the next level.

In this chapter, we enter the world of Yeoman. Based on the ideas of build automation, this chapter shows how a Yeoman generator can provide you with standard steps to develop Backbone application modules.

Bundled with Yeoman generators, there often comes a setup that favors the RequireJS module format over CommonJS modules. While CommonJS and Browserify are interesting when the JavaScript application must be loaded up front, RequireJS has its benefits if you are building a web application where parts of the experience should be loaded asynchronously as needed.

At the end of this chapter, our goal is to have the movie application running on the Node toolchains. This includes:

• How to fetch Backbone dependencies such as plug-ins using Bower
• Yeoman and a Backbone generator, which will help scaffolding project structures
• Using RequireJS for development
• Using a build with RequireJS project

Improving Productivity

In the previous chapters, you incrementally have built a web application “by hand.” This means that you ran commands from the command line to create files and directories, inserted repeating code by hand, and maybe applied a watchmode of different tools to help establish the development environment.

If you ...