Web Development Recipes, 2nd Edition

Recipe 14

Snappier Client-Side Interfaces with Knockout.js

Problem

When developing modern web applications, we often try to update only part of the interface in response to user interaction instead of refreshing the entire page. Calls to the server are often expensive, and refreshing the entire page can cause users to lose their place.

Unfortunately, the JavaScript code for this can quickly become difficult to manage. We start out watching only a couple of events, but eventually we have several callbacks updating several regions of the page, which becomes a maintenance nightmare. We need an easy-to-use tool that keeps track of all of this for us.

Ingredients

• Knockout.js^[30]

Solution

Knockout.js is a simple yet powerful framework that lets us bind ...