Learn how to build a full-stack application with Backbone.js by taking advantage of JavaScript modules, workflow automation, and Backbone’s interface building blocks. With this practical guide, author Patrick Mulder takes experienced backend developers and JavaScript programmers through the steps necessary to create a fully functional single-page application.
Backbone’s rich ecosystem of plugins makes applications easier to design and scale, but knowing which tools to use for your project can be tricky. How do you combine views and the data layer with Backbone, or serve and deploy JavaScript assets? You’ll not only learn the answers to these and many other questions; you’ll also discover Backbone’s vast number of use cases.
- Get started quickly by using a Backbone.js and Browserify
- Track state and organize data with Backbone models and collections
- Capture events from users by using views and manipulating the DOM
- Combine Backbone views with advanced HTML templates
- Use Backbone to browse remote data sources from an API
- Authenticate and authorize client-side interactions
- Build a backend API with Node.js and Restify
- Set up workflow automation with Bower, Grunt, Yeoman, and RequireJS
Before discovering software development for web applications with Java and Ruby in 2008, Patrick Mulder mainly worked as a software engineer on measurement equipment and electronic devices. Web development allowed him to learn about networks and linking documents, but working with measurement equipment gave him an appreciation for the many forms data can have. Not for nothing, Tim Berners-Lee invented large parts of the WWW while working at CERN, a European research organization for particle physics.
Yet, after programming with C, C++, Python, Ruby, and Java, learning Backbone.js proved difficult, as Patrick did not have much experience with the "non-blocking" behavior of JavaScript when he started working with Backbone. Luckily, he teamed up with a JavaScript developer, who taught him the differences of JavaScript from other programming languages. In the meantime, Patrick is convinced that JavaScript and Backbone are just great to explore data and interfaces for the Web.
Patrick likes blogging at http://thinkingonthinking.com, and has a passion for data-driven interfaces and data in general. After working in big and small software companies, he now works as a freelance software consultant, focusing on JavaScript, web interfaces, and measurement systems.
