backbone-plus

Backbone-Plus

The Goal

To make developing web and mobile apps with Backbone + Browserify easy and predictable, without treading into opinionated framework territory.

The 30-Second Changelog

• Comes with jquery-browserify out of the box
• Backbone.ajax caches responses to speed up initial view renders
  • Also patched to avoid conflict with browser-request
  • Defaults to Accept: application/json, CORS

// Using caching to improve perceived performance
var myView = Backbone.view.extend({
  initialize: function () {
    var self = this;

    this.collection = new Things();

    /**
    * If a cached response is available, `cacheRead` will trigger
    */
    this.listenToOnce(this.collection
      , 'cacheRead', function (resp) {
        // Parse the response and update the collection
        self.collection.set(self.collection.parse(resp));
        self.render();
      });

    /**
    * Perform a fetch.
    * Note: Even if a cached response was found, the request
    * will still happen, and this callback will still fire.
    */
    this.collection.fetch(function (err) {
      if(err) return alert(err);

      self.stopListening(self.collection, 'cacheRead')

      self.render();
    });
  }
});

• Better error handling in .save and .fetch
  • Non - 200, 201, 204 status codes are intepreted as errors
  • More meaningful error messages (Assumes message key in server response)
• .save and .fetch now follow node callback conventions

// Previously:
myModel.save({attr: 'changeMe'}, {
  success: function () {}
, error: function () {}
, headers: {}
});

// Now:
myModel.save(function (err) {
  // etc
});

// Or with options:
myModel.save({
  headers: {}
}, function (err) {
  // etc
});

Todo

• Drop-in compatability with canonical Backbone to make onboarding easier

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013 Ben Ng

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.