Backbone.js: Basics & Beyond

The structure of web applications is changing. In the olden days, you’d generate all your HTML on the server and send it down to your clients – boom, end of story, except for maybe a few ajax calls back to the server for interactivity.

These days, though, it’s becoming more common to build a server-side API that generates only JSON, and a separate client-side app (in JavaScript, of course) that consumes it. And Backbone.js a popular foundation on which those apps are built.

We’ll look at how and why this shift happened, and at the elements of a well-structured Backbone.js client. I’ll introduce some backbone patterns that I’ve seen in the wild, and explain when and why you’d use each one. There will be code!