JavaScript Web Applications

Chapter 11. The Spine Library

Spine is a lightweight library for JavaScript application development that uses many of the concepts we’ve covered in this book, such as MVC, events, and classes. When I say lightweight, I mean lightweight—the library comes in at around 500 lines of JavaScript, which is about 2K minified and compressed. Don’t get the wrong impression, though; Spine will let you build fully featured JavaScript applications while ensuring your code remains clean and decoupled.

I created Spine while writing this book because I couldn’t find a client-side MVC framework that quite suited my needs. The library attempts to enshrine many of the best practices proposed in this book, and indeed the book’s example application, Holla, is built using Spine.

Unlike widget-based libraries such as Cappuccino and SproutCore, Spine doesn’t make any decisions about how you display data to users. The emphasis is on flexibility and simplicity. Spine gives you the bare bones and gets out of your way so you get on with the fun stuff—developing awesome applications.

Spine includes a class library with inheritance support; Spine.Class; an events module, Spine.Events; an ORM, Spine.Model; and a controller class, Spine.Controller. Anything else you’ll need, like templating support or a DOM library, is up to you, so use what you’re most familiar with. Having said that, Spine includes specific support for jQuery and Zepto.js libraries, which complement it excellently.

Spine’s weakness at the moment ...