Full Stack Web Development with Backbone.js

Preface

Web users demand intuitive and responsive interfaces for tracking their finances and browsing catalogs. Unlike desktop or system applications, where interfaces are mostly built with flavors of C, C++, or Java, today’s web browsers only run JavaScript natively. But the same patterns that make graphical user interfaces successful on different platforms apply to JavaScript as well.

Many communities have formed around experimenting and developing ideas for the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern with JavaScript. It seems like every day there is a new idea about how MVC in web browsers should look and why other ideas won’t work for you.

In these turbulent times, the Backbone.js library stands out like a lighthouse. Unlike other approaches to JavaScript MVC, Backbone.js is very small and flexible. However, the main difference of Backbone.js compared to its peers is the Backbone “ecosystem.” Backbone’s philosophy of staying small gave birth to many plug-ins and a multitude of different, and some unique, use cases.

This rich ecosystem makes learning and understanding Backbone hard. If you are new to JavaScript, or if you have only built server-side web applications, you are faced with a number of problems. How do you combine views and the data layer with JavaScript? How do you abstract away JavaScript dependencies, such as Backbone plug-ins? How do you best serve and deploy JavaScript assets? But also, where is the “controller” in Backbone, or when are they used?

Answering these questions ...