Javascript Frameworks with Rails [closed]

Question

Hoping someone can help clear things up for me.

I've been reading a ton about the new javascript app frameworks out there, backbone.js, batman.js, ember.js etc...

And I see a lot of instances of them using the frameworks on top of Rails.

Can someone explain to me. Doesn't this require a ton of duplication in order to use them? ie. do I need to completely duplicate each model and controller? And if so, do I need to make changes to both each time?

I see a great benefit for rendering templates on the browser, but I feel like I'm missing something important when it comes to using these on top of an already well organized MVC structure.

What is the benefit and is there really as much duplication as it seems?

I've read the question here

But it doesn't seem to address the duplication.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The benefits are described in the question you linked to. They provide structure which is hard to achieve when you're client side does more than simply displaying data and reloading parts of the view with AJAX.

Andrew Dupont gave a presentation at MIX 11 about writing maintainable JavaScript. He describes his journey from a stinking pile of JS to a more maintainable code base. It is worth watching.

The duplication depends on how much you do on the server side. If your server is only serving data, e.g. Rails controllers providing a JSON API to access the models, you have to duplicate the models on the client side.

I am using Rails only for JSON access to persist the entities of my application, except some JSON views. The whole user interaction and CRUD happens on the client with Backbone & jQuery.

So far, I had only to duplicate the models in Javascript and create some controllers for accessing and saving the models on the server.