backbone: Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events

Earlier today, Jeremy Ashkenas from Document Cloud released yet another open source project from them. This time, it’s a library that gives you a spine to develop your JavaScript-heavy applications on top of, naturally, it would have to be called Backbone.js.

Backbone provides you with models, collections, and views – the core principles of Model-View-Controller development – for your JavaScript applications. As for synchronising the data between the client-side and server-side? Well Backbone has a neck for that too, a simple RESTful JSON interface connector. An example of a Backbone model and collection looks something like the following:

var book = new Backbone.Model({
  id     : '1-the-tempest',
  title  : "The Tempest",
  author : "Bill Shakespeare",
  length : 123
});

var Collection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
  url: function() { return '/collection'; }
});

var library = new Collection();
library.add(book);

This library also hooks into jQuery for some aspects of it, which could be a winning point, considering all the talk of MVC for jQuery. For those concerned about the size of your JavaScript, fear not, as the production version of Backbone weighs in at a tiny 2kb.

If you’re developing a JavaScript-heavy application, Backbone.js definitely gives you something to stand on.

[Source on GitHub] [Documentation]