How to combine JMVC (javascript-mvc) and server side MVC together

Question

I have asked this quesion few days before here and no one answered it.
I had asked it in forum.javascriptMVC.com too and now I have a answer, however I need a a bit more idea.

Question:

I read javascriptMVC's documents and I loved it. 
But I don't know how to use it in a large scale project.

I think on the server-side a MVC framework is needed or can help so much. And I've worked with server side PHP frameworks.

I am confused, my understanding of JavascriptMVC projects is that they handle client side events on the browser capture events, execute AJAX requests, manage the responses/data from the server and also show them to user in a graphical interface.

I know that in PHP MVC projects we also have controllers (and actions) that any of them is a separate page with a single entry point, my point is that these pages are whole HTTP requests.

I think the combination of these two frameworks would be in a form of a single or few heavy files (including js , css , imgs etc) that loads and managed by another Javascript libary such as steal.js. Now user can work with site and its actions (as events) that result in running js functions that may change something in the UI or cause a AJAX request, as in Yahoo Mail where most things happens in one page.

So how will this affect the design of controllers and actions in PHP ? I mean normally in PHP MVC frameworks a lot of controllers and actions means a lot of pages. I think because of AJAX the number of controllers and actions should be actually less. I also think because of JMVC most controllers (and actions) should turn to AJAX responders, however how are layouts and views to be handled in this context?

Finally

• I want to know about different aspects of using this method(JMVC+MVC). (I am using Yii as my server-side MVC framework and JavascriptMVC as my client-side MVC).
• I also want to know about management of data on the client-side.
• I would like to understand how AJAX and web-sockets could be used, where we can use AJAX and where we can use websockets?.
• I want to understand about local-storage how we can use it for simulated page data management and maybe caching, how we can cache data coming from server as JSON in a form of a page? I am working on a very large project and I want to build its foundation very strong.

Answer 1

Say that you jave a JMVC framework where

• The model gets data from the server using AJAX request - expecting JSON results.
• The view does not rely on the server, for more that providing the raw HTML.
• The Controllers do not rely on the server, for more that serving the JS files.

Essentially you use the server what it "should" be used for, data storage and processing, while you let your client browser handle all the tedious stuff.

Now, lets see how to define a server-side framework. As I see it we have several options, all of them fairly similar, albeit somewhat different (all returning someing in JSON format):

• A fully fledged MVC such as cakePHP
• Custom implementation
• WebService implementation

Personally I would use a WebService, and I already have. Or rather, I used a WebSocket based JSON-RPC WebService. Using a fully fledged MVC will have it's drawbacks in maintainability and, not insignificantly, server load. But it is very possible, just implement a view which formats the page as JSON...

Making a JMVC client does not, in my view, mean that it cannot request new HTML from the server. But it does mean that that requested HTML should be free of data, other than meta-data the Java-View needs to know where to put data recieved from, for example, the WebService.

So a main page in the JMVC could just contain a single

<div id=content></div>

and menu clicks can fetch a subpage from the server and load the content into content. Then that loaded content can contain some more javascript which starts WebService requests to get data from the server, to display in the empty placefolders it in turn contains.

Answer 2

First check https://stackoverflow.com/a/4458566/718224 after that you can move forward.

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Try this (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/8424768/718224)

No, you don't need to use it server-side, but it will help with organization / separation of application and business logic. Depending on the scale of your application, that could help tremendously in the future.

The key is just making sure you organize your backend code well, otherwise you will end up with a monolithic and/or difficult-to-maintain codebase.

Server-side views would contain your HTML and any JavaScript that may or may not make requests to the server. This assumes that you are actually using PHP to build the pages that a user navigates to.

If you have a static html page that builds itself using AJAX requests, then you may not need to use server-side views at all. Your controllers would more than likely be outputting JSON data. If this is the case, it doesn't make models and controllers any less useful.

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Try this (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/8424760/718224)

If you are using any of the major PHP frameworks (CakePHP, Code Igniter, Symfony, etc.) then you ARE using MVC already. If your server side logic is more complex than just a few really simple scripts than you probably should be using one of those frameworks listed, using MVC on the server and the client.

Many (most?) larger web apps being built today are moving towards using an MVC framework for both client-side and server-side application code. It's a fantastic pattern for separating concerns for many large applications, especially request/response server apps and event-driven browser apps.

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Try this (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/8427063/718224)

Backbone.js connects your application over a RESTful JSON interface. I honestly find that it works wonderfully in conjunction with the MVC framework. If you build a RESTful API, you can let you server manage CRUD updates quite easily. All your server side code will be responsible is saving and sending back JSON objects to Backbone.js. Then let most of your logic and magic happen within the Backbone.js framework.

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Try this (from https://stackoverflow.com/a/8078282/718224)

First, a client-side MVC framework like Backbone isn't just for single-paged apps. You can also use it to add some rich interaction to one or many views of a more traditional app. They simply provide structure and data abstractions on the client.

Next, these client-side frameworks are designed specifically to work with your back-end MVC frameworks. Backbone.js (since you tagged it specifically) models and collections work with REST services. They will talk via GET/POST/PUT/DELETE verbs and will ultimately communicate with your controllers on the back-end when they make asynchronous requests.

In the case of Backbone, it talks JSON instead of HTML. In the case of Rails, this is really easily handled in the controller. If the request is an HTML one, then you return a view as HTML. If it is a JSON request (*.json or Content-type) then the controller returns a JSON representation of the data. I am assuming that it is as easy in Django as it is in Rails to have the same controller respond to multiple content requests (HTML, XML, JSON, etc)

may this help you.