Unlike my first workshop today, my second workshop at FluentConf covers a subject completely new to me: Backbone.js. I’ve heard a lot about it, but never even downloaded it. Looking forward to learning a lot.
“Backbone thinks of itself as being lightweight.” It isn’t opinionated like Ruby on Rails, so Backbone projects can do the same things in very different ways. She’s going to show her ideas of the best way, but our ideas may vary.
Backbone is not MVC, even though parts of it have the same names as in server-side MVC frameworks (Models and Views). Backbone adds Templates to those two, not controllers.
The speaker came to JavaScript through Rails. At the time that meant that Rails wrote her JavaScript; she didn’t have to. Now she feels that is kind of like using scaffolding – a shortcut that won’t carry you far enough. Next, she used jQuery extensively. That’s powerful, but can be messy and hard to test other than with something like Selenium. Phase 3 was page objects. Create a unit testable object that has the JavaScript for the page. That seems to describe how she uses Backbone.
Backbone gives you model mirroring, views that handle events (and can render DOM). Models in Backbone are like MVC models and may mirror server-side ones (or something like them rather than one-to-one). Server-side views correspond to Backbone Templates. Server-side controllers correspond to Backbone Views.
The talk covers various tasks you need to perform, and how to do them with Backbone, ending with how it all fits together. I wish that had come first. Maybe it’s me, but I need the overall context to be comfortable with the pieces. Basically, set it all up by creating an app object with an initialize method that you call when your document is ready. That can set up the model, fetch the data, and use a view to render it.
Testing? Pivotal uses Jasmine, and there’s a talk about it tomorrow at 1:45.
Backbone is really good at interacting with a RESTful API, living in harmony with other frameworks and styles of JavaScript, and handling unique applications (due to its flexibility). On the other hand, it doesn’t have UI widgets, and it’s not good for developers who aren’t already strong in JavaScript (because it doesn’t give enough direction to them).
The talk is over very early. And all in all, I’m disappointed. I go to a half day workshop expecting to come away ready to actually create something with my new knowledge, not just get a survey of the topic. I could have learned as much about Backbone in a 30 minute talk as in this workshop.
Charles Engelke's Blog 