Andrew Burgess - Backbone.js Blueprints

Andrew Burgess writes code and writes about code. While he dabbles with around half a dozen different programming languages, JavaScript is his favorite and is also his first love. He's been writing tutorials for Nettuts+ since 2009, and he has been creating screencasts for Tuts+ since 2012. He's written a few small e-books on other web development topics; some of them are:

I'd like to thank Gregory Wild, Wendell Palmer, Larissa Pinto, and all the other great people from Packt Publishing, for making the book-writing process such a breeze. Thanks have to go to Jeremy Ashkenas for creating the amazing Backbone and Underscore libraries. Finally, and most importantly, I must thank my family for being so understanding with the crazy schedule that writing a book gives you.

Marc D. Bodley is a passionate User Experience Engineer and a jack-of-all-trades developer with over eight years of experience within JavaScript and frontend technologies. He is excited to see JavaScript being adopted as more of a mainstream development language and not just an accessory to development. He is equally excited to see the structure and thought process of more conventional, strongly typed languages being applied to JavaScript to bring order to what is potentially a large and disorganized JS-driven code base. He has worked on large- and small-scale applications for a range of organizations, from Belk.com, to start-up style data-heavy applications, and continues to look for, learn, and enforce JavaScript and programming best practices. He is grateful to be a contributor towards this effort.

Ivano Malavolta is postdoctoral researcher at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of L'Aquila, Italy. Currently, his research activity is positioned in three main fields: software architecture, Model-Driven Engineering, and mobile-enabled systems. He has co-authored scientific publications in international journals, and international conferences, and workshops in using these themes. He is a program committee member and reviewer of international conferences and journals in his fields of interest. Ivano is an instructor at the University of L'Aquila, and he is teaching these topics in dedicated courses for both the Bachelor's and Master's degree students.

He is a strong advocate of applying academic research results in real scenarios, and he is working on projects that have been awarded as the most innovative solutions in both national and international venues. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE.

Lorenzo Pisani is a software engineer with over a decade of experience in developing applications with PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. As a huge advocate of open source software, he publishes just about everything he builds, outside of work, to his GitHub profile (https://github.com/Zeelot) for others to use and learn from.

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Preface

There was a time when if you wanted to build a web application, you were pretty much on your own. You had to start from scratch and figure it all out on your own. However, now there are plenty of libraries and frameworks that you can use to build amazing web apps that are full of features; Backbone is just one of those libraries.

Backbone is a client-side library that offers models to manage data records, collections to use when working with sets of models, and views to display that data. Strictly speaking, it's not an MVC library, it's a relatively loose toolbox that you can use in many different ways.

This book is not an introduction to Backbone. We won't be going through every feature in the library as if it were a friendly version of the documentation. Instead, we'll be looking at Backbone in the context of building an entire web application from start to finish. This means that there are a few features of Backbonea few obscure methods or propertiesthat we won't use at all. If you want to learn every nook and cranny of Backbone, you should read the documentation at http://backbonejs.org/.