Philosophy, Usage & Convention
Philosophy
"There's more than one way to do it" – Backbone documentation
There are many good ways to do things. Many patterns are left to the implementors to figure out
Shows a typical jQuery-based example, where selectors, event handlers, ajax calls, ajax callbacks, error handling are all on "one line" and tied to the DOM.http://jsbin.com/aHiPor/4/edit
We'll look at how to do it with Backbone.
(unrelated note: to request json in an ajax call use
dataType property)What's wrong with it?
- Data "disappears" once the ajax call is complete (it only lives in the DOM)
- Application state is tied to the DOM
- Re-rendering efficiently takes a lot of code – and its not pretty...
- Hard to test without mocking AJAX
- Blows up very quickly
- What about file organisations?
- Multiple dynamic elements per page?
- Tied heavily to selectors – changes to the DOM will break your code
- Selective re-rendering is even more code, and heavily reliant on data structure