Evolution of a Backbone application

In my weekend free time, I moonlight as amateur Backbone application development working on a music discovery site for independent electronic music. This also helps me with my general JavaScript knowledge as I getting more involved in front UI work.

Being my first real life JavaScript heavy application, I had to face some issues which may or not be unique to other people. My impression and thoughts:

• Backbone being too agnostic with how the developers manage their modules and code is a double edged sword. On one hand, it completely lets the developer decide and choose about how to setup the project, it takes away lot of your initial time on design issues which probably could be better spent in real life problems. As a result, no single dominant framework has come up like Ruby on Rails.
• For any decent size application, you will end up using one of the wrapper frameworks (Backbone.LayoutManager, ChaplinJS, Backbone.Marionette), so after your first TODO example, its worthwhile to investigate one of the above.
• Its probably worthwhile to learn up a module loader like Requirejs (if you have not yet done so). For a long period of time, I avoided reading up on the library and just bundle up various JS files using Rails “include” directive. This will eventually lead up to having multiple global objects which you definitely want to avoid.
• Spend sometime to do search on Bitbucket/GitHub to find a real world open source application using Backbone. Just like Backbone itself, there are no standard way on how you organize your modules/code files. During my search, I was lucky to look into an example of Cojiro which led me to backbone.boilerplate, whose structure I am using for our project.
• (NOTE: This point is something that I need to try out myself but I believe it pertinent to the problem in hand). Try to implement a small project (not the TODO MVC thats there everywhere) in multiple frameworks (Amber.js and Angular.js seems to be the more popular ones right now) to see how each one works. Even if you dont end up using those frameworks in any real life project, it will probably open up various other possibilities of improvements about how you write your application.

That’s it for now.