Painless Web App Development with Backbone

Have you ever tried to write a moderately complex browser side application with the assumption that jQuery is probably all you need for the job? I mean, fire off some AJAX requests, then just use some DOM manipulation to put the results where you want them—how hard can it be, right?

Would you have enjoyed maintaining the code that resulted from that assumption? No, neither would I.

Would you like to see a better solution?

As it turns out, programmers have known how to keep their frontend code under control for a while using a surprisingly simple principle called MVC. Now that the browser has suddenly become a serious platform for application development, the need for MVC (or, at least, the basic concepts behind MVC) has become so apparent that we already have multiple rival MVC libraries for the browser platform. Backbone is arguably the most popular of the lot, and certainly one of the most lightweight.

In this presentation, you'll learn how to harness the power of Backbone by example, as we build a simple browser side application from the bottom up using nothing but Backbone and your favourite DOM toolkit.