Working through Developing Backbone.js Applications

A mini-diary

Before I get completely seduced by Angular.JS and others equally as sweet for use on an upcoming and very important web app project, I really need to give Backbone.js another chance, a fair chance. Nothing could provide this with better timing than the publication now of the completed Developing Backbone Applications, by Addy Osmani. The book signifies a big change, in that it is simpler to dive into Backbone.js, and you can do it with more confidence since you are being shown a path following best practices.

Here’s the rub: Backbone.js is “not opinionated, meaning you have the freedom and flexibility to build the best experience for your web application however you see fit. You can either use the prescribed architecture it offers out of the box or extend it to meet your requirements.”

Wandering in the desert of plenty: An architect in search of an application architecture

I need to adopt a javascript dev and deploy stack as framework for my new venture Linguathon. I’m delighted about this project because it brings together language teaching and web app worlds, something I’ve postponed for decades. So I need to adopt a javascript MV* framework to give me a solid, sound, yet flexible foundation. I have been studying Addy Osmani’s Developing Backbone.js Applications (also see the fascinating work in progress mirror http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-fundamentals/ ), and “What we know now” (as Steve Blank is fond of saying… BTW I’m taking his free online lean startup course and reading his book; don’t want to make all the same mistakes all over again 🙂 ) is that I at least don’t have the time or even the stupidity to build everything from scratch using a bare bones, self-made, untried and tested by the community dev and deploy stack.

Learning CoffeeScript (no, for historical reasons)

The task on Pivotal Tracker (love using it) says “Learn CoffeeScript”. The project this chore forms a part of is really important to me, and while several important projects I am working on still deserve to be based on Drupal, others deserve a new kind of architecture, something wildly new and at the same time something going back to my roots (learning C with Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language enthralled with the hiding of detail overload prevalent in the Z80 and 8086 assembler languages I had been using) in the eighties (Turbo C…).