tag : Backbone.js

Giveaways

Better Backbone Applications With MarionetteJS Giveaway

This post serves a dual purpose: first of all it is to announce (to anyone who hasn’t see the original announcement on my social media accounts) that the book that I’ve been writing for the past year - that has kept me from more actively working with my blog - is finally finished! Second, I’m giving away 3 copies of that very same book! That’s right, I’m holding two giveaways at once: one for Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices and one for my very one Better Backbone Applications with MarionetteJS!

Giveaways

Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices Ebook Giveaway

The title may be a bit misleading. Yes, we’re having a giveaway, but we’re giving away so much more than just a copy of Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices. I’m also giving away my personal computer, the rest of my physical book collection, all of my passwords for all of my online accounts, half of my income each month for the rest of my life, aaaannnddd you’ll take over as Google’s CEO. I hope that was sufficiently obvious that it was an April Fool’s joke, which of course is obligatory when posting on this day.

Reviews

Book Review: Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices

Every once in a while I get around to reading a book. Books are typically nicer than blog posts because they show the whole picture instead of zeroing in on a tidbit. I was contacted by Packt Publishing to do a review of Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices. I was excited about this book because it had been a while since I read a good book on Backbone and the title gave the impression that it could be insightful to someone at my experience level with Backbone. So, did it live up to my expectations? Yes and No.

JavaScript

Spinal Surgery: Upgrade to Backbone 1.0

Hey everyone! Backbone 1.0 has been released! I just happened to pop by their site and see that 1.0 is official, so I have no idea how long it has been out. Why didn’t anyone tell me?!?!? Anyway, there may be some of you out there wondering what this new version brings and how they can update their apps to bring in all the new awesomeness. Well, let’s take a gander at this new stuff.

JavaScript

MarionetteJS: Better Backbone Apps

Backbone.js introduced us to a more modular way of developing today’s web applications by separating our code into semantic and reusable pieces. Backbone’s main crutch was that it offered only the bare minimum so that it was easy to learn and didn’t force you to do anything that you didn’t want to do, but we were left on our own to figure out how to handle much of the implementation details. Marionette is here to help with that.

JavaScript

Backbone.js (Sub)View Rendering Trick

In Backbone.js, rendering views is really simple, yet not so much. It’s simple because Backbone doesn’t force you into doing it any specific way, so you have freedom to just use a bit of jQuery and dump the HTML into an element. Then again, since it doesn’t implement anything on its own, we’re stuck writing our own implementations, making it more difficult than it could otherwise be. In the case of rendering subviews, things can definitely get a little more difficult.

JavaScript

NPM and Using Node as a Command Line Tool

Node.js was made to bring JavaScript to the web server so that people could use the same language on their front and back end, but that’s not its only possibility. Though it might not be extremely well suited for it, Node.js can still allow you to run command line tools easily. Many of the packages on NPM are command-line tools that make your workflow much smoother. Let’s take a look at some.

JavaScript

Backbone Application Walkthrough Part 5: RequireJS - Video Tutorial

Finally! We’ve made it to the end of the Backbone.js Application Walkthrough video tutorial series. In this final video, we make few small adjustments for the sake of organization and a bunch of other changes that convert the application to work using RequireJS. Almost every file gets touched in this video, but each only receives minor changes in order to create an overall major change in modularity and optimization.

JavaScript

Backbone Application Walkthrough Part 4: It Lives! - Video Tutorial

We’ve made it to part 4 of this Backbone application walkthrough series. This time we finally get the app to do something worthwhile… like work! The application finally lives as we implement the router and hit the “GO” button. Check out the power of the router and don’t forget that just because it’s running, does not mean we’re done. The next and final video in this series converts the application to work with AMD and RequireJS.

JavaScript

Backbone.js Application Walkthrough Part 3: New View and External Templating – Video Tutorial

Moving on to part 3 of the Backbone Application Walkthrough video series, we work on moving all of the templates to external files to reduce the dependency on the templates being included in the index.html file and so that they might become available if we use these views on different pages. Also, I added an extra view that wasn’t in the original application because, as you’ll see in the video, it makes things a little nicer.