Backbone View-Model Binding

by bartwood on April 30, 2012 in Introductions with No comments

This article briefly discusses how the Backbone.View class is normally used and then introduces a new class that helps makes it easy to synchronize your models and views.

The Backbone.View class helps you do a couple of important things that I’ll discuss in very brief detail:  (I assume that you are already familiar with Backbone.Views)

  • Create browser DOM elements
  • Listen to DOM element events
  • Listen to model events

Create browser DOM elements:

Backbone.View objects have a… Read the rest

Using backbone.js in my first product, what I learned

by Cedric Dugas on February 7, 2012 in Helping Guides with 5 Comments

This week I launched an online wedding planner called WeddingDeck. Weddingdeck has backbone in it’s heart. There has been ups and downs while using it, and I wanted today to talk about a couple of stuff that happened to me along the road.

Defining your structure

There is no predefined structure shipped with backbone. Much like jQuery in fact, you kind of have to make your own. Personally I would prefer if there was a preferred structure explained… Read the rest

jQuery Mobile and backbone.js, the ugly

by Cedric Dugas on January 30, 2012 in Helping Guides with 6 Comments

jQuery Mobile is a great technology, no doubt it can be an integral part of the future like jQuery is today. However even if the 1.0 version is out after more than a year after the alpha has been launched, it still feels like a very young product. There is enough posts and beginner tutorials around the web about the greatness of jQuery mobile. But not so much about the hurdles of jQuery mobile integrated in other systems. Let’s dive… Read the rest

Optimizing the views list creation with document fragment

by Cedric Dugas on January 2, 2012 in Helping Guides with 8 Comments

Before using backbone when working with a list of html nodes I always made it my duty to append them only in one big chunk of text. Manipulating the dom is slow, it triggers a reflow of the page, this is costly even on small lists, specially on mobile.

So being not sure what to do with backbone I decided to append each view directly in my container like this.

  var jqGuestList

… Read the rest

There is no magic behind backbone.js model.isNew()

by Cedric Dugas on December 19, 2011 in Helping Guides with No comments

model.isNew() can be quite useful, this method can be interesting when handling and changing forms behaviors from adding new items, to updating and deleting them. At first I did not quite understand how isNew() was working internally and, one day it just stopped working and that was frustrating!

It’s all about the id

One thing I like to do is prepopulate my fields with defaults values. Backbone has a great feature for that, when instantiating a model you can pass… Read the rest

Getting started with web mobile using backbone

by Cedric Dugas on December 19, 2011 in Helping Guides with No comments

Just found out a nice article about getting started from scratch on mobile using backbone.js. While normally I would not advocate rolling your own “framework”. I feel like mobile doesn’t need much to get going (at least with droids and iphone) and it can be a good thing to learn how that work since mobile is probably going to be a big part of the future.

Here a part of the article and the link:

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Let’s make a collective… Read the rest

Backbone.js walkthrough of Models and Views (Part 2/2)

by Cedric Dugas on December 15, 2011 in Screen Casts with 1 Comment

Backbone.js walkthrough of Models and Views

by Cedric Dugas on December 15, 2011 in Screen Casts with 1 Comment

Handling “variable is not defined” with underscore template engine

by Cedric Dugas on November 29, 2011 in Helping Guides with 2 Comments

One of the cool thing with backbone.js is that you can plug in about any javascript templating engine there is. Also another nice extra is that there is one already bundled with underscore.js that is quite powerful.

Personally the template engine provided with underscore cover most of my use cases and is enough for me, but there is one thing that I have found very unpleasant, you cannot pass undefined keys to it. Here an example:

var template

… Read the rest

Modifying your urls on the fly using the request method with sync in backbone.js

by Cedric Dugas on November 14, 2011 in Helping Guides with 1 Comment

Yeah that’s a long title, Backbone provides one default url for all your types of request with your models. But what if you want to be able to change your url model that is synching with your api depending of the type of request? Well that’s what we are here to do.

Backbone Sync

Sync is a nice utility used by backbone when you request your server to sync your model. Each time your request a change, backbone call sync,… Read the rest

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