Backbone.js: Run Your Application Inside The Browser

Follow the trends and you'll notice that, increasingly, web applications are running in the browser. That can be great news … until you have to write the JavaScript for all that client-side behavior. Fortunately, a new breed of client-side MVC frameworks have emerged, including Backbone.js. You still have controllers, models, and views … just in the browser.

Backbone might seem familiar, especially to Rails developers: it has the models, controllers, and views you'd expect in a server-side framework … but it all runs in place, inside the browser. The server ends up as the source & sink of data. We'll investigate the basics of using Backbone, how to create dynamic, interactive views, and how to get and save data. We'll see how concise and readable the JavaScript can be, especially when using CoffeeScript. Much of the complexity of modern web applications simply falls away when all rendering and client logic moves to the browser … as long as you have a proper backbone to hang that logic on.

About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the original creator of the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over fifteen years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard has been developing financial and e-commerce applications in 100% Clojure since 2012.

Howard currently works for Wal-Mart's Global E-Commerce division. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his children, Jacob and Olivia.

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