Backbone.js modular setup

Question

I am new to backbone, and I'm here to ask for a little bit of help understanding how I would go about building my current webapp project. I'm developing a modular administration panel for servers. Every single "page" of the panel should be a packaged "module" including controllers, models and views.

The panel will consist of a main layout view being loaded initially, with a basic navigation. When a user clicks on a link on the navigation, a page gets loaded via AJAX into the layout. (And if this sounds stupid / there is a reason not to do so please tell me :) )

Since others will develop these pages too, and since they are modular, I won't know what models, views and controllers I will be presented with inside the page i load via AJAX.

How would I best go about doing this with backbone?

I'm especially wondering about how I would extend Backbone models etc. dynamically, and how I would manage (for example) the user leaving the page and / or revisiting it later.

Does Backbone provide something I can work with, will I need to hack myself something together, is there a better way of doing things I am missing?

Answer 1

Your thinking around the problems sounds very correct. Make your UI components self contained as possible. Watch this 10 min video to get some more information on UI component best practices.

If you are interested about other important concerns of JavaScript application development, look at BoilerplateJS reference architecture which I published to share my experiences. That contains a similar sample application as you described (menu with component activation).

my recommendations for your UI component activation, deactivation are:

• Do not remove/create DOM components. Reuse with hide/show, as your elements will recide in memory even after removing from DOM
• Minimize keeping 'state' information on client side. When an user revisit the component, refresh it with a server call and then make it visible (use server as the single truth of state information).

See BoilerplateJS sample component implementations for more details. I know few who use it with BackboneJS (currently it ships with knockoutJS). We will ship a example of it using BackboneJS in v0.2 which is due in a week.

Answer 2

A common modular script loading framework that is used in conjunction with Backbone would be require.js. It might be what you're looking for. Require.js is all about AMD modules, asynchronous modules. Usually each model, collection, view is it's own module that defines the dependencies that particular module needs then loads those modules as needed. It's particularly well suited for large projects where you have lots of individual pieces that need to be mish-mashed together at different points of your application.

You could of course combine multiple backbone elements in a single module (usually I reserve this for Views and specific subviews that would only be used with the parent view) but it's really up to you.

With Backbone, usually the intent is to create single page applications - meaning all the page scaffolding is usually wrapped up as a single file and completely loaded onto the client-side at the get go. The data for each page is then called via ajax and populated as the user navigates and loads different aspects of the application. Is this what you intended in your description?

If you're looking to load different pages that are each individually grabbed form the server, then I'm not sure Backbone is the answer. There are other server-side MVC frameworks that help to accomplish that.

That generally touches on how Backbone is used for this sort of thing.

As for how to extend Backbone models and such, Backbone uses Underscore as a dependency and underscore provides a nice _.extend() function that can easily extend all your objects in pretty much any way you desire. Overriding default functionality, throwing in mixins, it's all pretty painless as far as Backbone goes. As a framework, Backbone is very agreeable when it comes to altering, modifying and customizing every little bit and piece.

As for handling users visiting and revisiting pages, Backbone.router allows you to create URLs that not only point to specific "pages" in your app but also to execute arbitrary code that needs to be executed to get there. Something like a logged in user visiting "mysite/#account" would trigger the router to load certain scripts that bring up that particular view as well as perhaps fetch() necessary data to get that view up and running for the user.

I'm not sure if there are resources out there that give you some kind of basic structure to start with. Most experiences I know of tend to go through the basic tutorials like "Todo List" and work their way up from there. I'm not sure what your experience level is with javascript or programming in general but I started with Backbone AND require when I knew really pretty much nothing. Only a vague notion of what JSON was and a low level understanding of HTTP as in, "it's that thing that gets web pages." That said, I think Backbone was really easy to get for me to start with and it's deepened my knowledge a lot about the whole client-side RESTful type app structure.

There is a really good list out there of the "Todo List" app in many different flavors such as Backbone and Knockout and some others. When deciding on a framework, I basically went through that code comparing all the different frameworks available and selected Backbone because it just seemed to make the most sense to me. I don't regret it. It's a lot of fun and I think the best way to get into it is to just try some demo tutorials.

Answer 3

Take a look at Marionette or Chaplin. Both are build on top of Backbone and provide a structured way to build larger application with Backbone.