Developing Backbone.js Applications

Introduction

Frank Lloyd Wright once said You can’t make an architect. You can however open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it. In this book, I hope to shed some light on how to improve the structure of your web applications, opening doors to what will hopefully be more maintainable, readable applications in your future.

The goal of all architecture is to build something well; in our case, to craft code that is enduring and delights both ourselves and the developers who will maintain our code long after we are gone. We all want our architecture to be simple, yet beautiful.

Modern JavaScript frameworks and libraries can bring structure and organization to your projects, establishing a maintainable foundation right from the start. They build on the trials and tribulations of developers who have had to work around callback chaos similar to that which you are facing now or may in the near future.

When developing applications using just jQuery, the piece missing is a way to structure and organize your code. It’s very easy to create a JavaScript app that ends up a tangled mess of jQuery selectors and callbacks, all desperately trying to keep data in sync between the HTML for your UI, the logic in your JavaScript, and calls to your API for data.

Without something to help tame the mess, you’re likely to string together a set of independent plugins and libraries to make up the functionality or build everything yourself from scratch and have to maintain it yourself. Backbone solves this problem for you, providing a way to cleanly organize code, separating responsibilities into recognizable pieces that are easy to maintain.

In Developing Backbone.js Applications, I and a number of other experienced authors will show you how to improve your web application structure using the popular JavaScript library, Backbone.js