Smashing CoffeeScript

CHAPTER 10

Writing Applications with Spine

Writing large web applications is as much of an art as it is a skill. Many techniques can be applied to supply consistency and structure to an application, but at the end of the day, experience, taste, and common sense also play a role. Even for the accomplished developer, much of the experience of writing code from other domains doesn’t readily apply to writing code with web technologies.

Using a previously written framework such as Spine.js helps in this regard. As the combined thinking of a number of developers who have built large web applications, Spine.js represents the wisdom and experience of web development boiled down into a set of best-practice designs. Even if you never use this framework, you’ll find value in learning these patterns and how you can apply them to projects.

This chapter introduces Spine.js, or simply “Spine,” as a framework for building applications. As a framework, Spine is incredibly lightweight, and is written in CoffeeScript. It integrates well with other web development tools such as hem, Stylus, and Jasmine, and is useful for architecting large application projects in a way that will ensure they are maintainable in the future.

Introducing Spine

Choosing a web framework is the sort of topic that gets many developers hot under the collar. Since the framework encodes or (worse!) enforces specific practices, people’s attitudes toward frameworks are often closely related to whether they think those practices ...